People often work in silos. Developers develop, designers design, and product managers manage. But these things don’t happen in isolation. Or, I guess, they shouldn’t. Within an application, UX design, content design, and the code all live together, tangled up in a beautiful creation that hopefully offers users a meaningful and engaging experience.
I’ve been learning about UX writing basics a bit recently, and I’m left sort of pondering the intersection of these fields in app development. It makes sense to me that the users are the sort of authority on what decisions should be made throughout the development process. And that the different aspects of an application, specifically styling, functionality, and content design, should create the ideal conditions for a good user experience.
It also seems to me that UX isn’t something for just one person in the development process to consider. Everyone throughout all phases of the development process should probably keep UX principles in mind because the user is the reason we’re all doing what we’re doing, right? Maybe this is a topic for another post, though.
I’ve also been reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, and I’m struck by the similarities between the principles guiding UX writing and clean code. Some of the ideas that lead to elegant solutions in coding are also used in creating seamless user interactions within an application when it comes to content design.
In this post, I want to kind of outline some UX writing basics I’ve been thinking about recently, briefly explore the commonalities between content design principles and the ideas behind clean code, and then muse about how these ideas might be useful for web developers to consider in their work. Think of this post as a tiny, speculative bridge between a couple of areas of development.
What is UX writing?
Alright, before we dive into why developers should consider things like UX and content design, I want to take a look at what UX writing is and define some key terms.
According to the Nielson/Norman Group, “UX writing is the practice of writing carefully considered information that addresses people’s contexts, needs, and behaviors. Writing copy involves many of the same skills as visual or interaction design, except writers use words instead of pixels to communicate with users throughout the experience.”
And Google describes, “UX Writers advocate for design, and help shape product experiences by crafting copy that helps users complete the task at hand. They set the tone for content and drive cohesive product narratives across multiple platforms and touchpoints. As our resident wordsmiths, they work with a variety of UX design-related jobs including researchers, product managers, engineers, marketing, and customer operations to help establish connective language and a unified voice.”
Finally, Spotify explains UX writing like this: “Here at Spotify, UX Writing is part of Design. We specialize in intuitive user-centred content strategy and microcopy, but our work doesn’t end there. We partner with design, tech, and product to create cohesive experiences with a consistent voice, ensuring we always sound like Spotify.”
Basically, UX writers create engaging copy to guide users within an application. It’s different than copywriting, which is used to market products to potential users, and it’s an important role within the design and development team.
Key concepts of content design
So UX writers design narrative experiences within an application through words. They design with words. Cool, right? Ok, so what principles guide this design work?
There are three sort of key concepts that dictate all UX design (content or visual). The designs should be: clear, concise, and useful. Easy, right!
When I think about these ideas, it feels like, “duh!” But how are these things applied in practice in the context of content design or UX writing? And how is this all connected to development?
In the case of content design, designing with words, the language used within an application should reflect what users expect to see at any point in engaging with an application and remove barriers to interaction with features of an application. The language should guide users through the application.
I think there is a lot more to be said about what good content design can do for users, but let’s move on to explore, briefly, the difference between UX writing and UX visual design.
What’s the difference between UX writing and UX design?
You may be familiar with the term “UX design” and be wondering what the difference between that and UX writing might be. I’ve kind of touched on it in the intro to this post, but I wanted to look into it a little more here to showcase parallel processes and concepts throughout UX design (content or visual). And to hopefully clear up any confusion.
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. UX design involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.”
So UX design is concerned with the whole process from start to finish of designing an application and its user experience. This design includes visual elements, like color schemes and button placement. And it’s closely related to UI design, which is its own thing. The Career Foundry explains, “UX design is all about identifying and solving user problems; UI design is all about creating intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, interactive interfaces.”
But UX design is user-driven, or it should be. So it’s mostly concerned with higher-level problems and solutions. What issues are users having with our application and how can we create a seamless experience for users?
UX writing is a part of this design process, the part concerned with the actual language used to communicate with users while they interact with our application. It’s the words on a call-to-action button and the error message you get when you input the wrong password.
These things seem small, and maybe they are in the grand scheme of the whole development and design process, but they are really at the front line of user experience and interaction. UX writers communicate directly with users at every point of interaction in an application, and it’s important to create clear, concise, and useful copy to guide users through the interactions.
Why should developers care about UX writing?
Again, I think there is more to say about all of that, and maybe I’ll write another post someday, but let’s explore why developers should care about any of this.
Developers know that there are multiple ways to solve any problem. You can loop through an array, for instance, with a for loop, or a while loop, or using .forEach() or .map(). Depending on what you’re trying to do, all of these things can allow you reach a solution.
And developers also might be aware that of all the possible solutions to a problem, one solution might be more elegant or cleaner than the rest. Sometimes I have a difficult time thinking about coding in these terms because they’re rather subjective. What does “elegant” code look like? But I think the principles of clean code sort of work out what these terms mean in relation to development and coding.
In content design, there are also many ways to communicate with users in an application. And the principles that guide UX writing and writing clean code are rather similar. So similar, in fact, that I was inspired to write this post.
Clean code and content design principles
Since I’ve blabbered on long enough about all of these things, I want to just kind of outline the similarities and commonalities I noticed between clean code and UX writing principles.
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Clean code does one thing well. (Single Responsibility Principle) Good UX writing is useful. |
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Clean code only contains what is necessary. Good UX writing is concise. |
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Clean code limits duplications. (DRY principle) Good UX writing is clear. (no need to repeat yourself) |
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Clean code makes it easy for other people to enhance it in the future. Good UX writing is clear. (someone else can easily understand how to use it) Both code and content are written for an audience. Whether the user, in the case of content design, or other developers. |
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Clean code is test-driven. Good UX writing is test-driven. |
Clean code and good UX writing are both obvious, simple, and compelling.
For now, I want to leave these parallels as sort of a bulleted list because I think each of these things could be fleshed out into its own post. But I’m not sure how far into UX writing I’ll end up diving. And who knows, maybe all of this is just the ramblings of a naïve tech newbie. Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about some of the ideas above, I’ve provided links to a few resources that might be helpful.
Final thoughts
I like making connections. The different aspects of product design and development don’t live in isolation, and in fact, the principles that guide the work people are doing have commonalities. The connection between UX writing or content design and writing clean code is interesting to me because these areas seem quite disparate on the surface. But I think writing clean code is a creative act. And designing impactful content is also a creative act.
In the end, ideally, the user drives the design and development of a product. So when we design content and code to be useful, concise, and clear, we’re ultimately creating a better experience for our users. And with the case of the code, very likely our future selves and fellow developers as well.
I hope these musings have been useful for you if you’re considering any of these ideas. If you’d like to connect, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Instagram or Bluesky.