Regular readers will know that my daily work is marketing-adjacent. And so one of the conversations that comes up regularly is why something written by an advertising copywriter is usually not fit-for-purpose for a UI design or digital interaction.

What is copywriting?

The traditional role for advertising copywriters in agencies is to write words for marketing campaigns and associated marketing channels — straplines and TV ad scripts, posters and direct mail. The purpose of this type of copy is to sell products by:

• Promoting brand messages and product attributes
• Leveraging consumer emotions
• Consistently executing a creative campaign or wrapper

As a result, the majority of marketing and advertising copywriting that I see today, when applied to digital channels (app screens, emails, landing pages, sign up forms and more) is focused on:

• Promoting brand messages and attributes
• Making the user feel a certain way about the brand
• Prioritising business needs and driving sales
• Successfully executing a creative concept

The focus is rarely on whether the UI is understandable, usable, accessible, or whether each individual user can successfully perform their desired task. Therefore I see a lot of work that looks like this:

rather than this:

This often results in longer and wordier amounts of descriptive text, buttons that don’t make sense to users. And don’t even get me started on large, centre-aligned blocks of copy.

Naturally, if a UX person feeds back to a Copywriter that words are excessive, confusing and inaccessible — this may not go down well. After all, no one wants someone else walking into their territory telling them what to do.

But copy is no one’s territory anymore — unless that person is the user.

What is happening here?

This situation is not due to malicious intent but rather misunderstsanding — it’s mistakenly trying to use advertising copywriting skills to do what we now recognise as its own specialist skillset — UX Writing.

Advertising copy is often just not appropriate for digital experiences. Digital platforms and interactions require a new and different skill set because it’s a new and different experience that we’re designing for. Just as CTA microcopy is not appropriate for writing long form newspaper articles. It’s a mismatch.

Today, traditional advertising copywriting is to UX Writing, as brand and visual design is to UI design.

The former is about the expression of the brand, and (as anyone who’s sat in a creative review knows) is subject to the creative and client team’s opinions. Whereas the latter is about what the user needs in order to successfully perform a task.

But — both of these skill sets and approaches ultimately want the same outcome; the user’s task is to sign up and the brand also wants users to sign up. But in only one case has the needs of the user been truly considered and prioritised.

What makes UX Writing different as a craft?

UX Writing is not about asking Copywriters to string together shorter or more boring copy on buttons. It is a craft in itself, with established and recognised user-centred methodologies and deliverables.

Copywriter-to-UX Writer is not as simple as changing your job title.

A UX Writer’s work is much more aligned to that of a UX Researcher or UX Designer. They follow a user-centred process in coming up with their word-based solution.

1. Understand

Just as you would with the wider UX project and its user-centred design methodology, you start with discovery and requirements gathering.

User — Who are the users? What are their mental models? What voice and style are they used to seeing in comparable products and services? What words do they understand and use themselves? What is their reading/comprehension level? What is their likely time and attention? What are their accessibility needs?

Business — What are the core tasks we want users to complete? What business-specific terms or jargon are we likely to include or encounter? How do we communicate differently form competitors? What is our brand tone-of-voice and guidelines? What digital and font/typographic guidelines do we have in place?

Tech — What is the platform we are writing for? What are the limitations and possibilities? What text length restrictions will we have? What fonts can the system support?

2. Define

There are a number of UX Writing-specific artefacts that are produced as the project begins to be defined.

Developing voice and tone hypotheses — We align brand voice to user needs which result in a platform or experience-appropriate product voice, under which is nested a series of tones for use in different situations.

Creating a tone map — We work out in which parts of the journey, flow, app or wider customer journey we should be changing tone. For example, where is it OK to increase brand voice such as humour and creative playfulness, and where is it more appropriate to just use very-plain language so that the user can complete an urgent, error-prone or critical task?

Creating a content matrix — Because we’re talking defining content and IA, we’re talking spreadsheets. So this is about documenting the words you’re planning to use, mapping specific tasks and journeys to the exact UI components or patterns in which they will appear.

Information architecture — The UX Writer works with with the UX Designer or IA to establish how the information hierarchy fits within the product hierarchy and user flows. All the way down to sentence structure and how actions and benefits are balanced for clarity.

Accessibility guidelines— We need to document any text-specific guidelines that should be followed including font usage/size, plain English (or other language comprehension levels), colour contrast, and of course alt text guides.

3. Design

This is one I struggle with, as my preference is to run initial iterations with lorem ipsum and paired back low-fi wireframes (because you find out the most amazing things about human brains work). But UX Writers often push to have live copy run into screens and prototypes early on. And they have good reason for this — they need something to test, iterate and validate.

4. Test/Iterate

UX Writers put live copy in real UI screens in front of users to get response and feedback. This can be as part of formal user/usability testing and run by the research team, or it can be as simple as cognitive or comprehension tests created and run by the Writer themselves, particularly when getting early stage feedback.

UCD method, but UX Writing-flavoured

In summary, the scientific method as applied to one area of UX Design — the words.

Can a Copywriter become a UX Writer?

There are clear overlaps as shown above, however again — you cannot “experience wash” this role.

One option is for a Copywriter to train as a UX Writer by attending courses (online or in person), learning the fundamentals of user-centred design and studying user behaviour and response to various digital experiences. And of course applying those learnings via the types of methodologies outlined above.

Once anyone gets involved in user testing for example, they cannot help but increase in user empathy and develop the UX mindset.

The other approach that I have had some success with, is pairing a Copywriter with a UX Designer — but giving the UX Designer oversight and sign-off on any UI-related work. This way, the Copywriter can learn a different way of thinking when writing for users, screens and tasks, and benefit from the knowledge and experience of UX teams without having to fully retrain.

This works well if the copywriter still needs to maintain a brand/advertising role, and is able to switch mindsets back and forth between designing for marketing, and designing for users.

In my experience of the most successful scenarios, the Copywriter has even been able to manage a mixture of both within the same product experience, switching between marketing and user-centric copy, working within a well-defined content matrix and tone map.

With copy and UX working seamlessly together — both in the team and in the interface — that’s where you truly start balancing user and business needs for successful product outcomes.