Weeknotes 21 July, 2023

Swiftly moving on from the lack of my Weeknotes last Friday, here’s this week’s…

Culling meetings to create focus time. I’m not afraid to say no to things if I need to, and this week it was meetings. Monday was pretty much back-to-back calls. When I checked to see what Tuesday looked like it was similar – and needed to change.

There were a few things in my calendar that could wait. And also some meetings I didn’t really need to be at or might not add heaps of value so they got culled. I used the time to get my head down on the next stages of the pricing and packaging project I was working on a while ago. The business has decided to pivot on plans so it’s back to it.

Proving that writing copy can be hard, that context is everything, and context switching sucks. I was working on a project while the owning Product Manager was on holiday. I had a brief for copy and thought I knew how to respond to it. I wrote something, then moved on to my next task. When the PM returned we looked over the Figma file together and agreed the copy wasn’t adding enough value. Seeing the copy with fresh eyes, I even thought it didn’t need to be there and that it would enhance the design by removing it. We both agreed as it stood, that was the case, but that the copy need was different to what the current copy delivered. Confusing, to keep up, I know.

The PM and I then started afresh. Co-writing 6 or 7 iterations. We landed on something that was clearer for the user and better communicated the value of what we were trying to express. This was microcopy. The task was not micro. Context switching really after starting this project and returning to it really threw a spanner in the works. Though, it did mean that we took time to consider the copy properly. Good copy takes time. And this is a good reminder, and great example for me to use when there’s a hint of someone undervaluing the impact of quality UX writing.