UX Writing Weekly #220

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This week in tech news: the good, the bad, and the lovely.

Good: An E.U. crackdown on dark patterns.
Bad: Google and Spotify both announced a 6% workforce reduction.
Lovely: Wikipedia’s first UI update in a decade (more on that below).

WHAT’S INSIDE ✍️

Issue #220 (Jan 25th, 2023)

Documenting your UXW strategy
Guide to product audits
A new type of tech job
Robot lawyers (no, it’s not a joke)

ARTICLES 🗞

💡 “Document my strategy and process? But that sounds like extra work!” OK, but what if it were actually easy and would save you work in the future?

Create a single source of truth and help it evolve for a productivity win.

Documenting Your UX Writing Strategy: Why and How to Do It

📋 The fine folks at Firefox have brought us a three-point plan for conducting a successful product audit. Bonus: check out the free audit template.

A content designer’s guide to product audits

🌐 Wikipedia took a bold step into the year 2006 with a new web 2.0 design. OK, to be fair, the subtle changes are quite nice. Craigslist, you’re next!

Wikipedia gets its first makeover in over a decade… and it’s fairly subtle

MICROCOPY BITE 💬

“Welcoming and easier to use” are always in style.

PILLARS OF COMMUNITY 🏛

Community answers to trending topics. Join the conversations below.

UPSKILL: EVENTS & RECORDINGS 📚

Free live workshop:

The Figma Happy Hour is back! Join us Monday, Feb. 6th, and sharpen your skills in this free live workshop. Spaces fill up fast, so sign up now.

Figma happy hour #4

On Feb 2nd, our friend Carla Kargaard, UX writer at Sessions, is hosting a free webinar on—you guessed it—ChatGPT! Get actionable insights on how to harvest ChatGPT’s full potential and learn why it won’t take your job (hopefully). Bring your groundhogs.

How to (actually) use ChatGPT

PORTFOLIO 🖌

Andrew Stoyanoff does more than UX writing/content design: style guide and heuristic creation, content auditing, quality assurance, user research, process building, and more.

https://www.andrewstoyanoff.net

JOBS 💼

Just a few short years ago, a job post for a UX writing position was a sign that something new was on the horizon. Now, they’re commonplace. For instance, here are two great positions at Wix in Tel Aviv and Booking in Amsterdam.

But this week marks another change, a new position in a tech company: Prompt Engineer and
Librarian.

Build up a library of high-quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with an easy guide to help users search for the one that meets their needs.
Build a set of tutorials and interactive tools that teach the art of prompt engineering to our customers.

The pay’s not too bad either: $250K–$335K.

Times are changing, and it pays (quite literally) to change with them.

More old-fashioned jobs on the job board.