Breaking down the UX Writer career path

As the need for design rises, so does the need for writing empathetic, clear, concise, catchy, and intuitive micro-copies for all digital products. Since hands-on designers cannot adequately master the skills of carving words in the right tone and voice while also contributing to the development, there was a need for someone to fill that void with soulful words. Hence, companies started hiring UX (content) Writers. This tribe of members supports the team with product micro-copies and helps various groups produce content that cuts the chase and straightforwardly communicates the message.

While talking to designers in my mentorship groups, I noticed that some budding design talent wants to get into UX writing. Hence, I decided to speak to a few hiring managers from the industry and put together a list of qualities or qualifications that upcoming UX writers can hone to get started in this domain.

#1 Experience in product writing

While having a degree never hurts or decrease your chances of landing a job, having some product writing experience is even better. The market is looking for folks with experience or a knack for communications, journalism, tech-writing, UX, HCI, and international languages beyond just English. Especially markets in Southeast Asia and Europe are looking for folks with a background in more than just one language — think Bahasa, Filipino or French, German.

Beyond the paper, the degree to show, the market will appreciate people who can demonstrate a diverse experience in user-focused product writing. Can be achieved by creating work samples in public by writing copies for your products and envisioning them with a different brand pull. Can display product writing as an expert in hardware, software, digital agency, or other relevant product areas.

#2 Multi-disciplinary writing samples

It will be even more critical for upcoming UX writers to display their ability to shape content for multi-disciplinary projects by writing for software products and hardware, collateral material, and branding works. When thinking about hardware, think of wearable devices, virtual reality headwear.

Before looking for opportunities to apply your writing expertise, it is essential to put together a list of UX-focused writing samples and style guidelines that you have put together in your career at the time. Design teams are maturing, and as companies build multi-brand products, design systems will play a pivotal role in product-driven companies. UX writers will need the skills to align themselves with the product guidelines, develop tone & voice guides for multi-regional products, and communicate the brand’s vision thru the use of empathetic copy.

#3 Habit of developing frameworks

In my previous point ☝️, I mentioned developing copy style guides and aligning with the design systems. To create practical style guides, UX writers need to go beyond and establish frameworks, look for and harvest content patterns, study other voice and tone guidelines, learn about information architecture (and how to improve it) and the hierarchy of content in products. It’s a lot to process. So, here’s a brief breakdown of each of these critical style-guide factors:

Think of frameworks as a string and series of knots for a blind person. The line-of-string gives direction, and knots are a way to read, learn and understand what lies ahead.

1. Establish frameworks: Learn to create systems, do’s, and don’ts for content to scale in various directions. Frameworks for copywriting works similar to design system frameworks — they are supposed to help companies build product interfaces without a lot of effort and as little thinking as possible. This framework should help guide the future line of product and the teams working on it. Think of frameworks as a string and series of knots for a blind person. The line-of-string gives direction, and knots are a way to read, learn and understand what lies ahead. Read that again.
2. Content patterns: Loads of product interfaces in a particular domain will become standard patterns that must be followed and learned. Think banking or social media or fitness industry — there is a specific way your address, tone, voice, and communication wavelength will change when writing micro-copies for each product. Therefore, it is imperative to learn these patterns, build more practices around the original ones and contribute to the system. To develop your content patterns, you must document your strategies with guidelines and establish best practices and principles.
3. Learning from others: Attend conferences, seek mentorship, pay for what you want, build your network, and tap into the broad industry expertise available in your network. Industry leaders in copy-writing like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Tesla, Karla, Zendesk, etc., can help you become an explosive UX writer. These companies won’t always share their guides openly, but if you ask for help enough times, then you shall get it. Find the way.
4. Information architecture and content hierarchy: Information architecture will become a complex topic for large-scale companies and products alike. As consumers and enterprises become more looped and complex, information architecture and order of content will be the only thing that can save users more time and make the products a success. Learning about IA will undoubtedly help. Some products are already seeking UX Architects to solve these issues.

As a UX writer expected to contribute to the designs systems, the ultimate goal will be to drive cohesion across products. A UX writer will define and shape experiences that motivate and guide users of the product thru’ a happy path and help them recover from the mistakes/errors along the way.

#4 Design Tools & Collaboration

“I do not know Figma. I can’t seem to master it. I will become a UX Writer as I don’t know Figma”

It’s foolish to abandon your dreams and settle for something less than what you are capable of achieving. UX writers can expect themselves to work alongside other designers and know their way around tools like Figma. Please get into a habit of going into each mockup and change copies for every screen manually. While systems and design tools become wise, some manual work will likely need before achieving intelligent automation and syncing.

As UX writers are strategic leaders in their space, they also collaborate with stakeholders other than product designers. These include researchers, legal, marketing, product managers, and engineers while influencing and adapting to stakeholders and their feedback. Feedback can come from all angles and language barriers. Therefore, UX writers need to have thick skin to receive feedback and modify the tone and voice during the writing journey.

#5 Thought leadership

While UX writers are still primarily individual contributors, they should exhibit thought leadership and formulate product roadmaps based on a series of broken and incomplete information.

A thought leader demonstrates leadership and influence/connect across geographically distributed teams.

UX writers also need to find creative ways to maintain a user-centered focus while working within regulatory constraints like legal, copyright terms, and conditions. It put them as equal partners and thought leaders in the industry. An easy way to practice working within constraints is to practice copywriting while getting into a habit of reading these legal, privacy, copyright, and terms & conditions statements. These are usually available on a tech-company website or when signing up to use their service in the “I ACCEPT” dialog.

Furthermore, UX writers need to be strategic. Therefore, they are allowed to provide strategic direction for the company's vision and writing. The strategic vision will enable organizations to drive the vision for language and content across a single product or multiple products. The vision framework sets UX writers as subject matter specialists and as someone pushing cohesive product narratives.

While in my experience, leadership means many things to different companies; it often means providing direction and mentorship to other UX writers and educating cross-functional partners on the role of UX writing and content strategy throughout the product development process. While this comes after 3–5 years of practicing your craft, it is still something to look out for and observe in leaders we to access.

#6 Manage projects & growing others

Once a product vision and style guide gets established, UX writers can implement the tone & voice onto new project territories. However, implementing new or similar guidelines for more unique projects will require workshop conducting and facilitation skills, which is an entirely specialized territory on its own.

Newer projects can lead UX writers to manage projects from needs assessment to implementation. They will get good at identifying opportunities, sorting and shifting through priorities, working within or securing additional resources, and managing varied stakeholders they have never worked with before.