I’m Lisa, UX Writer at inDrive. In previous articles, I talked about what a UX Writer is, why a product needs one, and how a UX Writer differs from a Copywriter. If you do not yet know the answers to these questions, please start with the previous two articles. If you are already in this sphere, enjoy reading!

UX Writers Team Workflows

What was first?

It all started when the copywriters’ team once helped a product team with wording in an app. The number of requests to ’fix the wording’ started increasing daily, so the team came up with a logical decision: to initiate the hiring of a UX Writer, a person to complete all these tasks.

When I started working at inDrive, in addition to the daily tasks, I needed to form the Tone of Voice (ToV) and the Guidelines: the rules that all my texts follow and that help me to avoid reinventing the wheel every time. These rules also help my colleagues write texts on their own.

How did we build the team?

A few months after I started working as the first UX Writer in the company, we began looking for more specialists to join the team.

What was important to us when hiring UX Writers:

• Knowledge of UX principles — how to design understandable and useful products.
• The ability to use this knowledge. This is seen in the test task we gave to candidates.
• Good, simple language or the prerequisites for it. Even candidates with a strong test task may use intricate wording, but if the writing is generally good, it would not be difficult to eliminate abstruse wording.
• Understanding of their grade — where the candidate wants to grow and what they expect from the position.
• The ability to hear people and work in a team. During the interview, it is clear when a person doesn’t make contact and unjustifiably bends their line.
• The ability to take initiative, interested in the UX field, willing to grow in it.

All these points apply to any grade; the main difference between the grades is experience.

How do we work together?

For microcopy to be consistent throughout the product, we need more than only the ToV and Guidelines. We also need good communication within the team, regardless of whether we work in the office or remotely.We have a daily 10-minute call to briefly discuss our big tasks.

• We have a weekly two-hour call to discuss current tasks and workflows and check the Guidelines and Glossary content.
• We create big tasks for ourselves: to present our team and our workflows to colleagues, to correct the cookie text and legal stuff, and to get into the FAQ section. We need to find time for all these big tasks that are in addition to our current tasks. We discuss such big tasks and collect them on a separate board in the task tracker.
• We help each other in our chat where we send screens, help each other with advice, or simply ask for a fresh look.
• We manage our Notions’ team space. All links to our documents and projects are collected here, our colleagues leading their projects are described and links to interesting articles and other resources are saved. In the same place, we write down everything that we discuss at meetings, what needs to be done in the near future and what we plan for later that we don’t want to forget.

Work Responsibilities: Junior, Middle, Senior UX Writers

The responsibilities map

There are three UX Writers on our team. Each of us has a different experience grade. Even before we hired the second and the third UX Writers, we’d created the work responsibilities map to display the expectations of each position and to help everyone understand their responsibilities beforehand.

Main points:

• Junior sends all their tasks to Senior to get comments and improve these tasks’ results.
• Middle UX Writer has to work fast. Senior UX Writer supports them with their tasks only during the trial period.
• All the documentation like ToV, Guidelines and Glossary stay under the Senior UX Writer’s responsibility.

How is grade reflected in the working process?

The Junior UXW is responsible for microcopy in projects with more settled flows, so there are not so many daily tasks.

Besides microcopy, Junior prepares posts for our inner platform about our team updates, follows Guidelines, and sends Glossary terms to be localised. All these activities help the newbie get into the sphere and build experience.

Middle UXW is responsible for rapidly changing or growing projects because Middle has enough experience to work quickly.

Senior UXW prepares microcopy for the projects that are most fundamental for the company, the ones that are used as good samples for other projects. In addition, in our team, the Senior UXW is responsible for all organisational tasks within the UX Writer team and helps the Junior UXW with all their tasks.

Workflows with Other Teams in the Company

How do we present ourselves?

One of the UX Writers’ goals in any company is familiarise as many colleagues with us as possible:

• who we are
• what we do
• he purpose of our work
• how to collaborate with us

We make presentations for UX/UI designers, developers and product managers, and we help our Support and Business teams apply our ToV and Guidelines rules in communication with people.

How we spread UX Writing principles:

• Get acquainted with different teams within our company, find out who is responsible for what. Sometimes just a message is enough to introduce ourselves and our goals and to ask how we can join a project to help from the UX writing side.
• Make workshops to show in practice how microcopy develops the product.
• Use the product, find points to improve, and then offer improvement suggestions to product teams.
• Follow our UX/UI designers practices; stay aware of our product’s changes.
• Consider business team requirements. UX is a part of business development; we can’t exist on our own.
• Present ourselves on our inner platforms: what we do, how to contact us, and what our ToV, Guidelines and Glossary are.
• Write articles and give talks on YouTube so more people know what a UX Writer is.
• Help our colleagues work with us. All the useful links concerning UX writing in our company are on one page in Notion.

How do we work with our colleagues from other teams?

Typically, there are fewer UX Writers than product teams. That’s why each of us works with several teams at the same time. In such circumstances, it’s impossible to get into all teams’ workflows. That’s why we communicate most with designers from these teams.

The UX/UI Designer is the one who usually initiates the involvement of a UX Writer in projects. It is their aim to make the best and most useful version of the product. UX/UI Designers involve UX Writers in a project at its draft stage. The designers then invite UX Writers to check the project before the development. Also, when UX/UI Designers research their project in the user test, they bring all the info to the UX Writer to determine the possibility of microcopy improvements.

The Product Manager more often involves UX Writers in the project in use when it needs to be reconsidered from the microcopy point of view.

UX Writers involve themselves if they see any poor UX in the product and suggest how they can deal with it using microcopy.

Besides the product team, there are Support and Business teams. We also get tasks from them and initiate any improvements. For example, we initiate improvements for the Support team if we see that their messages in the in-app chat don’t match the ToV of our product. We initiate improvements for the Business team if, for example, we see ambiguous reasons for the ride cancellation in the app.

What is the typical UX Writing task?

The task itself is not the beginning; it is first discussed. UX Writers have to establish their relationships with other teams and make people in our company know about us; otherwise, we won’t be involved in any projects.

Once our colleagues know who we are and what we do, we can proceed through the development stages:

1. Get the task. Determine whether we have enough information to do it. Do we understand the context? Do we have the link to the project’s layouts? What languages will be used? And the main question: How can we help?

2. Set deadlines. Ask all the questions in one message or comment, and assign the responsible UX Writer. It’s necessary to make it clear who will do this task.

3. Make a copy of the projects’ layouts in our own UX Writer’s space in Figma. Every UX Writer has their own work space. Then we save the initial layouts, add an arrow pointing to the revision, which appears on the right. Microcopy is added and UX improvements are suggested, even if these improvements are about the text colour or the blocks arrangement. UX/UI Designers decline offers if they can’t be used or willingly apply good suggestions.

The way microcopy can change the flow logically and visually

4. In agreement with the designer, we edit microcopy in the workspace with the final design, or we edit it at our own workspace and share a link to our version.

5. We comment on the changes — why this version needs to be released, what has changed, and why.

6. Ask to check for information. We change microcopy if there’re good points or explain why it is not worth changing.

7. We go back before development and proofread. The design may be changed, the structure of the layouts, and the microcopy may be missed; all this needs to be checked before these layouts are released. At this point, we are setting up this process.

8. Before entering development, UX Writers have one more responsibility: to write accessibility texts for voiceover. On iOS, voiceover is called the same — VoiceOver; on Android it is called TalkBack. Voiceover is for people with permanent or temporary limits, and releasing a product without voiceover means restricting access 8. Before entering development, UX Writers have one more responsibility: to write accessibility texts for voiceover. On iOS, voiceover is called the same — VoiceOver; on Android it is called TalkBack. Voiceover is for people with permanent or temporary limits, and releasing a product without voiceover means restricting access to the product for a significant number of people. We make sure that voiceover blocks are logically grouped and that the voiceover text is detailed enough to explain everything that happens on the screen to those who do not see the screen or see it poorly.

But what about online meetings? At what moment do you meet up and discuss the problem? You should meet when there is confusion, when you accept the task or when you want to present layouts. However, if you can quickly receive information about the task in the message, do not meet up; save your time and the time of your colleagues. The number of hours everyone now spends in meetings is excessive.