User-focused design
In short, UX Design — or User Experience Design — is dedicated to creating well-functioning, easy-to-understand, accessible digital experiences. Have you ever used an app that didn’t work well, things were hard to find, and it left you frustrated?
Well, that’s bad UX Design. Good UX Design is when things just work.
A UX writer knows all about how you can create great user experiences, but instead of doing it through visual design or code, they approach it through the lens of language, for example by:
- Writing copy that’s easy to understand, avoids technical lingo and instead explains things in a human way.
- Making sure that all writing is organized in a way that makes sense, and it efficiently guides people to what they want to do.
- Creating something that’s accessible to anyone, anywhere — even if they use a screen reader or are reading in a right-to-left language.
There’s more to it, of course — and we’ll dive into that in future issues of this newsletter.
So… what’s Content Design?
You might have seen another term being used in conversations about UX Writing. Content Design is a relatively new way of talking about design-focused writing that’s generally used to describe a more high-level approach to the discipline.
While a UX writer could be seen as someone who ‘just writes copy’, a content designer is generally seen as:
- Someone who thinks more holistically about the impact of writing on the entire product.
- A more strategic role with a bigger influence on the design direction of the company.
- Finding ways to communicate information in the best way possible, even if not necessarily with copy.
There are a lot of ways to describe the various writing disciplines in an organization —
this article by Chloe Tsang does a great job at differentiating between UX writers and content designers, while also explaining the differences with other writing functions you might come across.
However, in the real world lots of people use UX Writing and Content Design interchangeably. We shouldn’t forget this is a very new discipline, so it’s only normal that there’s an ongoing conversation about how these roles should be described.
That’s why Supershort covers everything at the intersection of design and language — no matter what term is used to describe it :)