Their duties also involve research, testing the UX content with users, creating the brand voice and style guides that adhere to brand guidelines, and more.
They’re normally part of a company’s product team, collaborating with UX designers, researchers, and strategists, but also work closely with product managers, developers, engineers, marketing staff, and stakeholders in order to get a comprehensive understanding of a product.
Many UX writers will tell you that they spend only about 10% of their time actually writing. The other 90% is spent collaborating in meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions.
UX content workflow
Here’s what a typical workflow might look like for creating UX content:
The problem
At the start of a project, a team of project managers, product owners, researchers, designers, developers, and data scientists would meet to define the scope of a user problem, which could be anything like a high drop-off rate at the onboarding stage, a page taking too long to load, decrease in subscriptions to a newsletter etc.
The content designer’s job here would be to decide how writing could help solve this problem. This would depend on the company’s goals for the product and the product itself.
Prototyping & research
UX researchers, designers, and writers would then put their heads together to sketch out a solution to the problem. After receiving feedback from product managers, stakeholders, and other members, writers help designers create a high-fidelity prototype.
This prototype is then tested out by providing a sample group of users with specific tasks and gathering information on their behavior and preferences.
UX writers would sit in on these sessions and take notes, paying close attention to the users’ reactions to the language being used in a prototype.
Testing, testing…
The team would then carry out A/B testing, which is a big part of a UX writer’s job, where users are presented with several versions of a piece of content. The results of these testing sessions will inform the next steps, whether it’s deploying the design or going back to the drawing board to find other solutions (which could be anything from just shortening a piece of content or rethinking an entire user flow).
And much more
All this is just one way creating UX content might look like. Depending on the size of the team, they might have other duties, such as attending workshops, collaborating with translators to localize the product in a different language, and coming up with content strategies.
