5 reasons why you should hire a UX Writer
Photo by Vincenzo Malagoli from PexelsPrefer to listen?
Listen to the recording of this post on my podcast, Content Stand-Up.
Whether you’re a lean 12-person start-up or a 234-person series B, you need a UX Writer on your team.
Hiring a UX Writer — freelance or full-time — will not only dedicate a person to thinking solely about the content in your product, but it’ll also transform your design process and execution for the better.
But I have a product designer? They can write just fine, right?
If you’re expecting someone to excel at visual design, UX design, and UX writing, you’re looking for a unicorn.
That’s because thinking about content and thinking about UI are two completely different skill sets.
As a UX Writer, if you asked me to make a screen visually attractive, my first resort would be to open a design-in-a-box tool like Canva.
UX Writers are trained to think about:
The power of words (or lack thereof)
Nuances of brand voice and tone
Content hierarchy
Mastery of less
Product Designers are trained to think about:
Composition
Visual language
Visual hierarchy
Color
Typography
The longer the list, the more specialized the skill set — written communication vs. visual communication.
While there’s definitely needed collaboration and overlap between the two roles, asking a Product Designer to excel at UX writing is like asking Tom Cruise to do his own stunts.
That said, out of the many possible reasons, I wanted to highlight 5 key reasons why every design team needs a UX Writer.
1. A UX Writer makes your product consistent, which builds trust
When you hire a UX Writer, you’re hiring someone to think about the content in your product holistically. For them to do so, you’re hiring them to follow or create detailed style guidelines that outline everything from spaces between em dashes to serial commas.
Without someone governing and evangelizing these guidelines, you’ll have 7 product designers all using different conventions.
This isn’t so much a problem when it comes to semicolons or apostrophes, but when you don’t have established guidelines around using “my” or “your,” you end up with “Your account” alongside “My cart”.
These types of inconsistencies not only make your product look sloppy, they create confusion and chaos. Confusion and chaos break the trust you worked so hard to build with your users.
And once trust is broken, you have 4 competitors eager to sweep your users away.
2. A UX Writer helps people who don’t read understand what’s going on
A great UX Writer writes content you either don’t notice because it’s so intuitive or it’s so delightful you can’t help cracking a smile. It’s copy so clear you can spend seconds skimming it to get the gist.
In the hours I’ve spent in user research, it’s been shown time and time again that people read the headline and the button briefly at best.
It doesn’t matter if you explain something — it can easily be glossed over.
What a UX Writer does is prioritize information to make 7 key points known in a glance, for example.
It’s not magic, it’s training.
UX Writers dedicate their 10,000 hours to honing the art of crystallizing a message. And that’s not the priority or — shall I argue — the core responsibility of a Product Designer.
It goes beyond writing concise UX copy — it’s about blending what’s important in the product to what’s important to the user in a perfectly balanced piece of art.
3. A UX Writer makes your product sound human, creating a comfortable experience
The average person usually notices copy when:
It makes you smile
It’s confusing
A UX Writer steps in to make your product sound human, helpful, and humble, transforming engineering mumbo-jumbo into everyday language.
A UX Writer is tasked with taking complex concepts and making them accessible and understandable to someone with little to no context on the details of the matter.
That’s a hard job.
So, imagine doing that on top of perfecting the visual communication in a 40-hour workweek.
When your product sounds human, the reader doesn’t notice it. Which is a good thing, because it implies the experience feels natural, casual, and comfortable.
Think it’s easy? Try translating this into something that sounds human:
4. A UX Writer can flex the brand voice, which can save delicate moments
Whether you’re sunsetting a product or trying to retain a user canceling their subscription, messaging matters.
Delivering bad news requires empathy, staying calm, and being upfront. That’s a balancing act you hone over years of practice, not something you knock out of the park the first time around.
A UX Writer knows not to dance around the subject, give unnecessary details, or drum up urgency if it’s not critical.
The trust you build in handling moments of pain and worry well builds lasting relationships that withstand rising competition.
5. A UX Writer is an expert, which saves you time and money
UX Writers are experts at:
Being concise, informative, and clear
Researching information needed
Putting the right words in the right places
This saves you time because this process, for anyone outside UX writing, is often much slower.
In addition, UX Writers are experts at:
Delivering sensitive news effectively
Distilling and displaying value props at the right moments
Building relationships with moments of delight
This saves you money by encouraging retention, minimizing the number of bad reviews, and increasing upsell conversions.
Just like you wouldn’t want the hygienist to do your crown, an expert on the job makes sure things are done right the first time around.
Yuval Keshtcher, the founder of the UX Writing Hub, says it well in an article on Career Foundry:
“In the world of product design, getting a UX writer is like when you got your first smartphone; you never understood how much you needed one until you had the chance to work with a talented UX writer.”
We’re still in the early days of UX writing, and now is the time to bring a UX Writer on to your design team.
If you don’t, your competition will. And when they do, the difference between your content and your competition’s content will be decision-making for your users.
If you’re looking for a freelance UX Writer to prove all these points, send me a note. I’d be happy to chat about how words can transform your product.
