Weeknotes 10 November

What a better week this one’s been. It’s been ultra-productive too. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve plowed through.

Writing job descriptions. One job description to be exact. I’ll soon be recruiting for a UX Writer or Content Designer with a focus on UX copy. It’ll be amazing to have some help!

Contemplating coachmarks. These feel outdated to me. Surely users are so used to seeing tutorial-style stuff that it’s now invisible? Working on these this week has thrown up heaps of questions. Next week I’m going to dig out some best practice research – let’s see what this brings.

Summarising what content designers do for others. Or rather, the ways in which we can help. I’ve shared this with my team ahead of running some workshops. The non-exhaustive list includes:

• UX Writing best practices, including writing for different personas.
• Content hierarchy, information architecture, and taxonomy.
• Copy and content testing. Including Terminology, Cloze, and Highlighter tests.
• Writing good prompts for AI (prompt engineering).
• Brand voice (which includes tone) and personality
• Localisation
• And lots more!

Exploring how stress and trauma affect users needs. A couple of years ago I was working on a chatbot to help people with a life-limiting disease. Creating content principles was a crucial step for us. We used them to ensure that content was always helpful and use useful, and never overwhelming.

More recently, I heard that a user had found the colour of warning messages triggering. I can’t remember if this was at or outside of work. Let’s look into this more via scenario I’ve made up:

Imagine you’re in debt. Let’s say it’s for your electricity. You’re getting letters, emails, and texts to remind you about the money you owe. You’re already balancing paying for rent, food and water. You know you’re going to struggle, at least right now, to pay. How do you think you might feel when you see multiple payment reminders, likely in red?

Uncanny in it’s timing, I joined Content Folks’ call yesterday about trauma-inspired content principles. Rachel Edwards from Content Design London shared her experience of managing this. Rachel Edwards from Content Design London shared her experience of managing this. It was so insightful. Watch the recording, and in your work definitely never, ever assume.

Being the party pooper. Jason Fox’s Hold My Party Horn talk at Button 2023 has been very much living in my mind. It focused on how we’ve come to over-use celebration in product design.

Think about how often you’ve seen this in success messages, at the end of said coachmarks above. Tutorials, empty inboxes, the lot. It’s too much.

In Jason’s words, it makes your content, “A clown”. I see applying celebration like exclamation marks – use it/them sparingly. I use exclamation marks only in what would be real fist pump moment. So with celebration I’m also clamping down. This doesn’t mean cheerlessness – quite the opposite. It means less is more. More effective celebration.