I’m taking a course in CX Writing for Marketing Engagement with the UX Writers Collection. It’s a great self-paced class designed by a leading Content Developer for companies like Nordstrom, AT&T, Google and Facebook. This week’s lesson was on how to write for increased engagement. It included a video from Google’s I/O ‘17 presented by three women on the Google Content team. It’s definitely worth 30 minutes of your time if you’re in any type of content development, UX writing or product management role. My key take-away is that user-first UX writing must be:
Clear: written in language free of jargon and with sufficient context
Concise: written in a style that is economical and scannable
Useful: written in a way that directs the next action
An example from the I/O ‘17 UX Presentation by Google Content Strategy team.
Your brand voice, applied with the appropriate tone, is layered onto these principles to achieve great UX writing.
I couldn’t help but connect these three principles to a book I’m reading right now recommended by a friend who listened as I complained about my need to break an increasingly bad habit of overconsumption of social media. She sent me James Clear's NY Times bestseller Atomic Habits. Clear notes whenever you want to change your behavior, ask yourself four questions:
How can I make it obvious?
How can I make it attractive?
How can I make it easy?
How can I make it satisfying?
These questions are at the core of human instinct. It is what drives our behaviors whether you’re trying to change your own personal habit (stop mindless Instagram scrolling), or you’re writing UX for a technology product to encourage new adoptions. How we structure and frame a new behavior makes all the difference in whether it’s adopted (action is achieved, old habit is broken, a new habit is formed, a product is adopted, the button is clicked on, the user swipes rights, you get the idea) or whether the action isn’t taken, the old habits subsist, the user “Xs out.”
As I think about the customer journey for various products and services offered by my clients, I keep these four questions and three core principles at the forefront of my writing process.