Redação Estratégica para UX: Aumente engajamento, conversão e retenção com cada palavra

by Torrey Podmajersky

Quando uma organização depende de seres humanos comportando-se de maneira específica – comprando ingressos, jogando ou usando o transporte público –, as palavras bem colocadas são mais eficientes. Como escolher as melhores palavras? E como saber se vão funcionar? Com este livro prático, você vai aprender como redigir de forma estratégica para UX usando ferramentas para construir os alicerces do texto das interfaces com os usuários e a estratégia de voz da marca para UX.
A estrategista de conteúdo UX Torrey Podmajersky discute estratégias para conversão, engajamento e suporte aos usuários, além de maneiras de fazê-los retornar à experiência. Você vai usar frameworks e padrões para conteúdo, métodos para avaliar sua eficiência e processos para criar a colaboração necessária ao sucesso. Também vai estruturar toda a voz da marca de modo que a marca seja facilmente reconhecida por seu público.
•Aprenda como funciona o conteúdo UX ao longo do ciclo de vida de desenvolvimento de software.
•Use um framework para alinhar o conteúdo UX aos princípios do produto.
•Explore o design focado no conteúdo para basear o texto UX no diálogo.
•Aprenda como os padrões de texto UX funcionam em diferentes vozes.
•Escreva um texto significativo, conciso, dialógico e claro.

Genres: Design, Writing, Nonfiction, Business, Technology, Personal Development, Web

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 28, 2019

About the author

As president of Catbird Content, Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has written inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft. She speaks, teaches, and mentors UX folks worldwide.

Reviews

[heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclosure: I got a review copy of this book.
Further disclosure: Torrey is part of the pink-haired tech people. We are legion.

This book is a snappy and sharply-focused exploration of the words that make the magic happen in user interfaces. Podmajersky accurately identifies places that more needs to be said, and then avoids them, because this is not that book. It's honestly inspirational to me as a writer, and it keeps this book very tight.
In many ways, it reminded me of Kathy Sierra's amazing book, Badass: Making Users Awesome - both books have that relentless focus on users, experience, and empathy. The two most useful sections _Strategic Writing for UX_, for me, were the chapter on editing iteratively to achieve specific goals, and the chapter on UX text patterns, which broke down and named a lot of things I knew but hadn't had good vocabulary for.
This book is so concise and usable that I'm going to add it to the library at work, because I think it benefits everyone to have a shared vocabulary around this, even if we aren't directly doing design or development. It's full of pithy and hard-hitting quotes that I want to pin on my wall, like:

“Humans can't improve when they don't have feedback. We can make changes, but we can't determine whether those changes are good are bad if we aren't paying attention.”

and

“The most essential usability is accessibility.”

Read if:
* You don't have a UX person or team, but you're pretty sure UX needs to happen to your product
* You are the UX person and you're looking for a way to organize your 30/60/90 day plan and explain the business value of your work to other people
* You're a developer and you think UX isn't your problem. (It is)

Skip if:
* You are only talking to machines all day
(You should still read the section on error messages)

Also read:
* Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
* Slack's Voice and Tone Guide (https://api.slack.com/start/designing...)

[Clowd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book written exactly in a style Torrey advocates UX writing should be: clear, consise, conversational and just to the point. Hence why it’s super easy to read without any extra nonsens just to fill the pages. Torrey gives us the baseline of UX writing, which includes heuristic evaluation (similar to the one for UX design from the nn/g), process of editing text, text patterns, how to measure success in UX writing and a lot more useful information which I’m not going to go into detail. Recommend to anyone wanting to learn about UX writing for whatever reason.

[Eliza Marin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probabil cea mai bună carte de strategie de conținut pe care am citit-o. Torrey are un fel de inginerie inversă prin care te plonjează în cum arată textele de UX -> la cum se scrie -> la cum se construiește strategia de conținut. E scrisă foarte concis și bogat pentru că taie din puful nenecesar ca să ajungă la esență- cum faci design de conținut pentru a puncta atât obiectivele organizației dar și nevoile userilor. Kudos ei că ne împarte și nouă metode organizate de lucru. Abia aștept să le aplic.

[Radoslava Koleva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I finally read this book: it is a proper product copy revelation.

Let me tell you a short story about the company I work at: some time ago we recognized we have 'a problem with the words' when it comes to CX but we could never pinpoint what it was exactly and how to fix it. So we hired two senior copywriters with no CX/UX experience and guess what - 9 months later the problem still exists and we still don't know how to solve it.

UX writing is a speciality on its own and I'm so happy to have read a book dedicated to it. Unlike usual writing where the words are meant to be read, enjoyed, digested or analyzed by the reader, the UX copy should be invisible. Nobody uses an experience with the idea to read; if anything, they find big texts a nuisance and often drop off when faced with a wall of written instructions.

Fixing the UX copy is not just about hiring a copy person and giving them a writing task. It requires special skills and a formulation of a framework which can set up a team for success in the long run, rather than fighting small fires here and there.

I do have two weaknesses of the book to point out:

1. I found the chapter 'Measuring UX Content Effectiveness' to be interesting but misleading! It was the part I was actually most excited about, hoping it provides strategies and tools for translating UX content improvements into ROI. This is what my bosses want to see when I claim my team 'improved' something and the book only gives a couple of brief paragraphs on A/B testing. I would have liked to see examples and exact measurement of how a copy change brought an uplift in any of the KPIs of the organization

2. I wish the book was longer! I read it in a day and I found it so interesting and useful that it makes me wish the author had expanded a bit more in certain areas, and had provided more examples. But I guess copy people have a thing for being concise :)

All in all this is a brilliant read for anyone working in CX, UX, Product.

[Anastasiia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I opened this book to get to know how to write good error messages. What I learned from it though is so much more than just “good ux copy”. The book offers lots of insights on establishing ux content strategy in your organisation.

First few chapters give a perfect overview of the notion and purpose of ux writing. Frameworks, methods, tools, practices and as a cherry on top, detailed guides on how to deal with different ux patterns (titles, buttons, labels, etc).
Besides that the author describes what we can do to achieve continuous improvement of our ux writing, such as content auditing, measurements and various user research methods.

Since my role as a ux designer encompasses not only ux writing, the most valuable chapters for me were the last ones. Chapter 8 describes the workflow of ux content strategist that may be applied in any other field. A well-considered plan on how to introduce ux content strategy into an organisation and set a foundation for future growth and improvement.

Basically the author shares their tips&tricks about the following:
- Stakeholder interviews
- Divergent/convergent thinking while gathering information
- Establishing new collaboration processes
- Creating working relationships and building trust with the team
- Milestones and progress indicators
- Setting a foundation for future growth

My favourite quote of the book: “For a writer, the simple act of listening uncovers a gold mine.” Not so simple though 🙂

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strategic Writing for UX is a clear and focused introduction to UX writing. It establishes a clean definition for what exactly UX writing is, validates the need for UX writing as a distinct role, and illustrates how it fits in with the numerous, often ambiguously-defined user experience and product design responsibilities.

The core of the book outlines what an effective approach and process for UX writing looks like using model app interfaces for demonstration and context. I see this as a valuable reference resource whether you are a writer, content strategist, designer, developer, or product manager. UX writing as a practice really has the power to streamline the design process by providing dedicated effort in an area where the responsibility too often is not specified. Words matter, and everyone benefits by giving them the attention they deserve.

[Naisa Chaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Não era o que eu esperava, me surpreendeu muito. Novo favorito para aplicar no trabalho.

[Rune]

not entirely sure why I thought I would be into learning more about ux content writing after I spent WEEKS complaining about all the content writing my boss had me doing. oh well

[Brandon Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book I wish I'd had to reference back in 2018 when I was writing a voice and tone guide for the company I was working for. I did alright without it, but Podmajerky brings an elegant depth to the idea of voice and tone that I, in my rather novice experience with the subject at the time, really could have benefited from. The good news is that I'm assisting with voice and tone once again at my new company, and am currently the primary person responsible for the way we communicate within our product, so Strategic Writing for UX is proving useful.

Podmajersky's techniques for developing a consistent, actionable voice for UX writing takes a bit of time to formulate up front, but it's wonderfully prescriptive once the groundwork is complete. She dedicates a fair amount of time to demonstrating how to utilize the guide once you've built it, both in the practice of writing interface copy and applying its principles to UX evaluations (a practice of auditing how usable a product is).

This is a useful book for any UX writer or designer to keep at their desk.

[Paprika · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title speaks of itself — the book is about building strategy without going deep into the tactics of writing copy for different elements in the interface. In that sense, I believe that “Microcopy. The Complete Guide” by Kinneret Yifrah would perfectly compliment “Strategic Writing for UX”.

So, it was a good read to structure knowledge that I already had on UX writing (ton of voice, writing patterns, user and business goals). But there also was something new for me to learn. For example, the 30-60-90 days plan for developing the UXW strategy.

And I particularly liked chapters on measuring UX writing. First of all, it highlights the importance of UX research. Secondly, gives courage to use A/B tests.

All in all, a good read!

[Natalía Papadopoúlou · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m overly enthusiastic about finding this book. UX writing is a sub-field in product design that is just starting to bloom and this book is so well structured that made me wonder why couldn’t we have such a book for UX design 10 years ago. Seriously, I got so jealous of having such a clear process of how a UX writer works that would be reckless for anyone in the product design industry to not read it. One day designers will work closely with UX writers to deliver the message an Organisation needs to deliver via a product. A bridge between strategy and delivery that is missing at the moment from many processes, indicating that the career path of a UX writer will need a lot of facilitation skills.

[Nathan D. Riggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book doesn't add too much to your arsenal if you've been dealing with UX for quite some time, it does serve as a great primer for remembering what matters--and more importantly, why it matters. This is especially helpful for UX novices, as it focuses on "real world" applications, but in some key ways the book will serve anyone who takes the time to read it regardless of experience. It's a short read, but one that deserves plenty of note-taking and highlighting, as there are some sentence-level gems in the text, so it might take longer to get through than your average ~150 page book.

[Prinses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book on UX Writing

A super practical and genuinely useful book on writing for UX. It considers where the industry is at the moment, and what UX writers (and their teams) need to do to succeed.

[Peter]

When I bought this like 2 years ago, I was trying to get into UX writing as a career and had trouble slogging through what should go in a field label. So I dropped it and kept it in my "currently reading" as a gag.

But now I've been a UX writer for nearly a year and finally picked it up again. It's better this time around since I can be like "ah yeah, field labels, my god." Also, I can skim the boring parts that don't apply to my actual job. Thank GOD I'm not in charge of my company's voice chart.

Not bad for some helpful lil nuggets. There's some stuff I bookmarked for later that might be useful in the future: user testing, building metrics, the aforementioned voice chart.

I'm not totally sure who would get the most out of it. People trying to break into UX? I dunno. It's hard to engage when it's all theoretical. Experienced writers? It'd be wild to not already have most of this in practice. Maybe I'm in that sweet spot of just starting my career. I know where I struggle and where I'm comfortable.

To match my workflow, I would've liked more tips on asynchronous collaboration with designers and product leads. And maybe a different approach on modeling the hypothetical examples of the businesses. Like with a feel that's closer to co-designing and following the thought process to the end goal (but including various examples in the first place was a helpful thing to include!).

Still gonna throw this on my desk at work and see if I can get some suck up points. Wish me luck.

[Meagan Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book largely focuses on technical writing for user-clarity. It has a large focus on verbal logic, while maintaining awareness of user-affordances and heuristics. The book strikes a good balance in exploring a mental model of how to make decisions about what you are communicating in your technical writing and why. By outlining the strategic goals of different techniques (I.E. personality, information focused, etc), it can help create team consensus on direction and excecution, but it helps establish tools that can be utilized to make informed decisions around the inherent function of copy. This book shares many ideas as strategic business and marketing books, but the emphasis and focus on User interface and User experience is nice because it applies those larger ideas to a much smaller scale, encouraging us to think about these decisions regarding any interaction touchpoint that occurs along the customer journey.

[Thomas Resing · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best book for my day to day work as a UX writer at Microsoft. It helps that the author has experience working for Microsoft. However, she brings a broad perspective beyond more than one role at Microsoft.
What I love most about this book is that the author provides relevant examples across industries. It's short enough to read the whole book. It's comprehensive enough to provide guidance for a large set of people in this emerging field.
Highly recommended to anyone in a technical field who writes a lot. Even if you don't work as a UX writer, you may have the chance to provide input. Or, you may want to learn about this role that is a very interesting part of the software design process.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this one really helpful both in thinking about ways of approaching UX content design problems and in providing a vocabulary for talking about those problems. The author’s outline of how they approach the first 30/60/90 days on a new product team toward the end of the book was also quite solid.

That said, it’s a bit of a dry read, and while it’s interesting to think about how you’d operate as a pure UX content strategist, it would be useful to have a bit more elaboration around how to integrate content design into existing processes on teams without dedicated content strategists (i.e., most product teams), where the role will presumably be shared to some extent between a designer and a PM.

[Christi · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best UX writing staples around! Torrey provides well-reasoned and researched processes for designing compelling in-product experiences. The book is full of useful examples and tables you can use yourself in day-to-day content tasks.
My one gripe with the book is the fact that it ignored 2 of the 3 examples in the second half of the book. After setting up 3 different and meaningful examples for the first half, 2 of them simply fall aside in the later half. While focusing on one allowed the measurement chapter to be streamlined, it would have been nice to see a comparison between the examples and how one might score a 7 and the other a 3.
Despite that, Torrey created one of the must reads for all product content folks!

[Elissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will now be my bible. It's already flagged and underlined, but I'm going to put it on a shrine and refer to it whenever the product lords are testing me.

If you're getting started in UX writing, transitioning from copywriting, or if you're a member of a product team you should read this book, inhale this book, live this book.

It's single-handedly helped me create UX processes for my company from the ground up, and has been more of a practical tool than any course. I'm infinitely grateful to the extremely talented author for creating a guide that's not only enlightening, but immediately applicable.

[Nicole L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads well as a textbook that one can come back and refer to when specific sections are relevant. It's very easy to navigate through and I've come back to it over the last two years and found whatever I needed very easily.

Advices are very practical, concise, and easy to follow, and Torrey does a great job at applying findings to three hypothetical companies, that are different enough that one can see each method used in a wide variety of applications.

Even though there's many more UX writing books published now than when this was first written, I would say this book still remains a must-read in Content Design, and it paves the way nicely for any other in-depth book that is more recent.

[Yuliya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another must-read for UX writers and who considers becoming one.
I liked the introduction of text heuristics to get a baseline of the text quality and possible directions for text improvements. I'm looking forward to implementing something similar in my projects.
Another thing I liked was the diagram of voice and tone, and how different the texts could sound with the focus on different values and voice characteristics.
So the heuristics and tone and voice guide are the first steps in making the texts in your apps better. It's a solid foundation for future growth and changes.

[Jackie Unglesbee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was on my TBR list for a while.

I've texted 5 different colleagues about different parts this book. It has actionable nuggets that can be applied now, regardless of where you are in your UX writing career.

The book is written authoritatively, but I found myself responding out loud to several things Torrey wrote. It felt like a conversation with a trusted teammate, and that is the best way to learn.

I first borrowed from the library but I also purchased a copy to keep so I can highlight and fold pages and take better notes. You should too.

[GagaMil · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're an aspiring UX writer, you can't miss this one. It's one of those books that you'll get to use in your work right away and you'll keep rereading it as you (and your company's UX maturity) grows. The author shares practical examples – so there's no generic, abstract explanations – and suggests specific action points to help you create UX copy that meets the goals of your user and your organization.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a design methodology for content!

Torrey's book gives a quick overview of UX writing as a discipline (including its importance), but very soon delves into the details of how to actually do the work. This book is an invaluable resource for both new UX writers/content strategists and the design teams who wished they had one.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more of a 3.5 than a 3, but you know...goodreads doesn't allow that.

Great content overall, but the process is skewed towards Enterprise sized companies, and less towards startups and smaller teams.

[Alex Carbajo Regueiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a good starting point. Podmajersky explains what worked well for her during this years as UX writer in companies without this role before she joined.

It would be nice to see in few years the next step. How to work at scale with UX writing

[Pan Pan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-structured book with clear examples, personally recommended solutions, and summaries at the end of each chapter. Easy to read and take notes of! It cleared my thoughts about UX content. I am happy to start paying more attention to UX writing with the lead of this book. Thank you, Torrey!

[Chloé Thibaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

The hands-on guide I wish I'd read a year ago, before any other book or article on content strategy.
It provides real first-hand, concrete information and guidance on how to actually do the work, and is full of useful tools and advice that can be put into practice immediately.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a new and developing UX writer, this book is quickly becoming my holy text for breaking into the field and working on projects. What a resource! Smart, straightforward, and immensely helpful. Highly recommend for folks doing UX writing or content design of any kind.

[Aylana Ferreira Scatolini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muito conteúdo útil, mas também te coloca como líder de toda uma equipe, ao invés de te mostrar como fazer sua parte e manter todos informados. Liderar uma equipe demanda muito mais do que apenas comunicar e pedir feedbacks.