Roles of UX Writer

While working as a UX Writer, you’ll have many roles and responsibilities. But all of them will be connected to the one overarching goal of UX writing: using words to create intuitive digital experiences. Good UX writing and microcopy should guide users through the product and help them easily achieve their goals within the product. It should be inconspicuous, often something the user barely even notices. 

In order to achieve this, you’ll wear many hats. You’ll conduct research by speaking with users and learning about problems they may be facing with the product. You’ll also work as part of a design team and implement solutions to those problems. That’s right, UX writers should be thought of as an integral part of the design team and design process because UX writing is ultimately a design discipline. 

You will, of course, be writing copy, but you’ll also spend time testing that copy. Optimization is an ongoing process, so don’t think you’re ever going to run out of things to do. At the end of the day, your work will impact millions of users, so take your responsibilities seriously. UX writing and design can have profound real-world consequences, as we’ll see shortly.

Take a look at this Radio Shack ad from 1991. Calculator, alarm clock, weather forecast, PC, mobile phone, portable music player, answering machine, camcorder, voice recorder …

Today, all of these once manufactured products have been consolidated into a single physical product (a smartphone) that contains digital versions of the rest. It’s a striking example of how the traditional products of the past have been replaced by digital ones. Keep in mind that the music player on your phone is no less of a product than the Discman you would have bought in the ‘90s. One is digital, one is physical, but they’re both still products.

Like physical products, customers favor the digital products that work best. We use Google because they designed the best search engine, or WhatsApp because their platform is well designed and makes texting easy. When in need of a new product, many users will download several different apps that serve the same purpose and then try each one to see which works best. If the app is poorly designed, the user will almost certainly uninstall it. Just like you wouldn’t use a tape dispenser that doesn’t cut tape, you won’t use a poorly designed digital product.

A product’s design is the single most critical component to its success, and for digital products, the text is one of the most important aspects of the design. For this reason, UX writing is a skill that will become increasingly important as we progress through the digital age.

But what’s in a name? As Juliet said, “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” Since the field of UX writing is still in the early stages of development, there are several names associated with it:

• Content Strategist
• Content Designer
• UX Copywriter
• Web Copywriter
• User Experience and/or User Interface Designer (UX/UI Designer)

But don’t let that confuse or discourage you. What’s important is the actual work you’ll be doing, which will include aspects of business analysis, research, psychology, and even marketing, along with writing the product’s copy.