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Learn how to incorporate UserTesting into the digital product development design process as a UX writer, helping your test reduce risk. |
This article applies to: UserTesting
On this page:
- UserTesting for UX writers
- Ensure consistency of language
- Empathize with customers
- Write for all
- Align to business strategy
- Manage user mental loads
UserTesting for UX writers
- User experience (UX) writers are an integral part of a digital product development team.
- As a UX writer, you might find it challenging to validate your work and implement human insights into the development process.
- As a UX writer, you can integrate UserTesting into the digital product development process to help your team mitigate risk.
Ensure consistency of language
- Consistent language includes feature descriptions and naming conventions, person, tense, punctuation, etc.
- While collaborating with the digital product development team, provide input about the features' names so the customer isn’t confused.
- Does the language in your digital product help customers easily navigate their way around and do what they want/need to?
- Use the Messaging comprehension template to gather insights into your customers' reactions to messaging and positioning.
With human insights gathered from your test, you can:
- Listen carefully to the words users choose to describe their expectations of a process.
- Ensure your design and language align with their understanding of that process (mental model).
- Make sure the creative idea generation is aligned with personas and how competitors talk about similar features, etc.
- Support clear messaging when working with your release manager or consistent descriptions of features and functions.
- Align with customer education to ensure documentation and product language support each other.
Empathize with customers
- UX writers use mental models to empathize with how customers expect things to work, especially around their thought processes and how something works in the real world.
- For example, think about how customers will use features.
- Do they find it easy to understand what your feature is or does and how it relates to them?
- If they will view buttons, will they need further description of what they do? Use a template like Mobile app evaluation to test ease of use.
Write for all
- Accessibility is important to customers.
- Use a usability test to determine how copy and features, like HTML elements, work with a screen reader.
- Create a screener question or add the Other requirements filter to let contributors know they’ll need to use a screen reader for your test.
Align to business strategy
- Consider your organization’s wider business strategy.
- Perhaps your company was originally targeting enterprise customers, but with your new product, you will be targeting a wider range of customers.
- One of your company’s principles may be to “use simple language” to accommodate more customers.
- Our Messaging comparison template will help you gather human insights when considering two messaging options.
- This is also a great time to share these human insights with key stakeholders.
- UX writers often do this through storytelling, writing up findings in a way that can help the team engage and make informed decisions.
Manage user mental loads
- Many teams that bring in UX writers at the end of the process find problems only surface when an experience is tested (e.g. users don't understand the difference between two similar features).
- UX writers must collaborate through the entire digital product development process to think about managing cognitive load.
- Use the Test website usability template to see how customers complete tasks.
Cognitive load includes:
- Purpose of the copy
- Copy being clear and concise
- Eliminating unnecessary steps
- Minimizing visual distractions
Helping customers make decisions by using:
- Categories
- Collapsible menus
- Descriptions and examples to explain options
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