Elly Searle: Fierce UX-Writing Advocacy – Episode 64

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Elly Searle is a fierce advocate for UX writing.

Like any UX professional, her advocacy starts with the end users of the products she works on.

But Elly is probably best known for her work advocating for pay equity for her content teams. Thanks to her efforts, Elly’s writers are treated the same as their design, research, and engineering counterparts.

Elly and I talked about:

• her work at CrowdStrike as the head of content strategy for a fully distributed team
• how her remote workers collaborate, and their recent switch from Sketch to Figma
• her journey from tech support to technical writing to technical communications to UX
• her good fortune in landing at Microsoft just as they were taking more of an interest in conversational design
• how working at Nordstrom showed that a low bar to exit in retail makes UX writing a high-stakes practice
• how listening to the trusted sales people at Nordstrom informed UX writing practice there
• her fierce advocacy for end users, and for internal users
• and her equally fierce advocacy for UX writers
• how she quantified the results of her work at Nordstrom and thereby got her UX writers paid at the same level as engineers
• how the use of plain language helps front-line designers communicate better with non-technical stakeholders and improved training programs
• the importance of being mindful of which words you put in front of folks who will then use those words in conversations with end users
• the UX writing course that she and Torrey Podmajersky created at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts
• the growth of the field of UX writing
• the difference between voice design and conversational design
• her desire to see more UX-writing attention paid to enterprise clients, not solely the ultimate end users

Elly’s Bio

Elly Searle has done a bit of everything in the user experience world: broad-reaching consumer products with Windows, customer-centric retail at Nordstrom, and technical apps for enterprise audiences in cybersecurity. She received her Masters from University of Washington Human-Centered Design & Engineering program, and founded the tech writing and UX writing teams at CrowdStrike. Elly co-created the UX Writing Fundamentals curriculum for Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. She’s a fierce advocate of treating writing, design, research, and engineering as equals, in product development and career growth.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

If you’re working in content strategy or UX writing and making a good salary, you may owe Elly Searle a note of thanks. Elly is a fierce advocate for equal pay for content folks who work on product and enterprise teams. At companies like Nordstrom and CrowdStrike, she has shown the value of her teams’ work and aligned their pay with the technical and design talent they work alongside. Elly is also a content-strategy educator and a thoughtful advocate for plain language. We had a fun conversation. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 64 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Elly Searle. Elly is the Head of Content Strategy at CrowdStrike and Elly tell the folks, because CrowdStrike isn’t a household name like some of the companies I’ve had on, but tell us a little bit about CrowdStrike and what you do there.

Elly:
Sure. CrowdStrike, we are called an endpoint security company, so if you’re familiar with like McAfee or Norton or something like that, it runs on servers and laptops and is looking for intrusions, it’s looking for software that shouldn’t be running there, those kinds of things. And we do it at an enterprise level. So that’s probably the key difference in why most people haven’t heard about it, is that it might be in your company that has bought it, but you wouldn’t as a consumer have come across it or bought it. So yeah, so we do a lot with intrusion detection and also, we specialize in nation state hackers. So it’s kind of a fun, cybersecurity is a fun industry to be in right now

Larry:
Nowadays I can only imagine. And your role there as head of content strategy. How big an operation is that? How many folks you have?

Elly:
So head of content strategy is because I set up both the technical writing and the UX writing teams and we are, I’ve got two other UX writers right now and we’ve got five or six technical writers and we’re hiring because there’s a lot of things that need to be documented. And we are housed within the UX team, which houses the front-end engineers, the UX designers, the visual designers, the researchers, QA for all of that, and then my tech writers and the UX writers as well. So we are all under the same management chain and work together really closely together, which I think is the way I think it should be.

Larry:
Yeah, and that makes perfect…there’s so many people on the show and just happen everywhere else in this industry talk about silos and connecting. And so to see UX and technical content connected not just seems great, are there some efficiencies about that or…

Elly:
I think it’s just been hugely important and we’re part of the fundamental part of the software development and life cycle process. Like it puts me in a position to advocate equally with my front-end UI engineering management about where we need to be contributing, how we need to be resourcing priorities, all of those kinds of things. So there’s that, just making sure that we’re involved at the right time to give the right amount of feedback and watch the project evolve, get teams to clarify what problem they’re actually solving. Sometimes when you get somebody to write it down, you realize not everyone’s on the same page. So that’s been a huge efficiency add to teams and projects.

Elly:
So yeah and then just because we’re all together, we’re a fully distributed company and so we have project off-sites together and so we get to get together with our researchers, our designers and our engineers and our QA at least twice a year. And so we build those relationships and it makes it a lot easier for engineers to realize, oh, I don’t need to write this. I have somebody who can write that for me. And the technical writers can describe everything a lot better. And so I feel like there’s a lot of efficiencies that come from that.

Larry:
That’s interesting. Remote work is so common now, but in my experience it seems slightly less common in the UX world because there’s so much collaboration there. Can you talk a little bit about how you all, especially the design part, the technical part, I can kind of see sort of but there’s a lot of collaboration there too, right?

Elly:
Yeah, it’s something, we use a lot of Zoom meetings and a lot of Slack and we actually, the remote is one of the reasons we moved from Sketch to Figma so that people could collaborate and work on the same files at the same time. And like it was just too complicated to try, the Sketch files we found there was a lot of delays and lags, especially with time zones and things like that. So having everybody looking at the exact same thing has been a huge efficiency for remote work.

Larry:
Interesting. This is totally anecdotal, but it seems like Figma is the Gmail and Sketch is the outlook or something like that, right?

Elly:
I mean yeah because there’s some things I still like better in Sketch, but just the benefits you get from everyone being on the same file at the same time, you can’t make up.

Larry:
Is that your main virtual collaboration tool or do you use other stuff?

Elly:
We also use Whimsical as a way to sort of get into that like posted noting and storyboarding and user task flows and things like that. So that’s another tool that we use that again, we can just all share the same files.

Larry:
And this is all the cool new modern stuff. But you’ve been doing this about 20 years. You didn’t start out with these tools, right?

Elly:
No.

Larry:
I love to hear people’s stories of how they ended up, because you now have at least six or seven people reporting to you, tech writing people, UX people and you’re growing. But a lot of people in your situation, I’ve met people in companies similar size, there’s one person or maybe two people doing all of this stuff. Tell me about your personal journey to get to here. But what I really want to also ask about, and this is why I first asked you on the show, is you call yourself a fierce advocate and I believe it, you’re a fierce advocate for this work and for this kind of work and the people who do the work and getting them on board. So first, tell me about your story. Like how did you end up here?

Elly:
Yeah, for sure. And I think it does lead to why I’m so passionate about it because I actually started in just straight up technical support. It was a long time. It was 1999, Y2K, anyone could get hired to do technical work at that point, especially because I already had a four year degree. I majored in English and communications studies. And so I was doing the technical support and I found that a little draining. And a friend pointed out like, hey, you’ve got all this writing background, my company’s hiring a technical writer. Do you want to come join? Why don’t you apply for that? And so I got a job for, it was actually a security company as well, a network security company. And I became a technical writer there. And this was back in Minnesota. And at one point my company bought a Seattle company and that Seattle company had somebody who’d gone through the undergrad technical communications program at UDub.

Elly:
So UDub has always been cutting edge on this, understandably. And so I got introduced to the concept of writing in these are interface and came to a society of technical communications and STC conference out here. And a lot of the UDub technical communications just now HCV master’s students were presenting. And I was like, oh, that looks like the problems I want to solve. Because unknowingly, I’d already been conducting usability tests just because I was like, hey, this thing is beeping and I think that’s a bad design. I’m going to get people to sit in the room with somebody who’s more of our users level. And it beeped I think 50 times while they were trying to configure it, the Sidewinder appliance, the firewall appliance and they changed the shipping schedule so that they could fix that. So yeah, so I found that there was this whole user experience industry and grad school that could teach me about it. And so I joined right as they are transitioning from being called technical communications to human design and engineering. So HCDE.

Larry:
The HCDE program.

Elly:
Yeah. So I’ve been on a couple transitions. So after that I went to Microsoft and worked on Windows 8, which was when they did their major transition to more conversational language. They were much more interested in localizing, they decided that was worth the expense of, we’re just translating. So they’re really encouraging people to put more of the personality, making it more human into the interface. So I was really fortunate to be there at that time and get to really be supportive to explore how far can you go, what is the right amount of conversational and in conversational is that casual, what does that mean? And so I was doing both still long form but also UX writing and the interface with the designers and had great partnerships there.

Elly:
And then wound up moving to Nordstrom, which they had the term the title UX red, I’m like, Oh that’s the part I really want to do. Like I like and appreciate long form, but it’s getting in the interface and solving those problems while they’re there instead of writing about it somewhere else that they have to go to is a thing. I just, I, it’s the part I, the problem I like to solve and Nordstrom is just fantastic about how much they value the user experience. And so, and in retail, the bar to exit is so low. Like somebody, if they don’t like a single word or it’s just not, you know, it makes them feel a little different. They possibly could go buy from someplace else. You know like it really is about emotional design as well and Nordstrom was really good at recognizing that, so I got to sort of level up in terms of really being thoughtful about how can we personalize this, how can we customize this, what work can we do for the customer so that they stay engaged and involved and convert and and feel taken care of like that.

Elly:
That was part of the philosophy as well and so about the the work path there. I also was one of their first UX writers. It was the second one after Sarah Swanson and I was like, Hey, I want to present a while reviews. Like I want people to understand the iterations we go through with content similar to what the designers go through and it was the first time they’d had someone do that and it was fascinating. It was the first time I think a lot of those designers had really seen the difference like it was just a notification screen. Do we say we are going to tell you about this. Do we say you’ll be told about this? Do we put a command format? And so seeing those three versions next to each other and understanding there’s a different emotional reaction, I think it started helping them really value the UX writer, designer partnership. And as we talked about that, one of the things that I had advocated for was that the writer is beyond the same levels as the designers. And so they created a principal UX writer position.

Larry:
Great. Because you showed the benefit. Yeah. Show you work and did that. That’s so interesting. You mentioned conversation early on in there that you were fortunate to get to Microsoft at the time. And I think that’s one of those big huge tidal wave trends that I see in a lot of the interviews I’ve done, is that conversation has become, we’ve gone from like a broadcast world to a conversational world and I wonder how much of that originates in the UX world. And then to add the high stakes-ness of being at Nordstrom or in the retail environment where it’s like, I’m out of here, it’s just so easy to just decide to go to Amazon or TJ Max or whatever to buy something else.

Larry:
So that just seems really interesting to me, those trends kind of coming together to elevate this whole thing. And then this kind of culminates with you doing this presentation saying, and here’s how important words are in this whole conver… because if you think about it, I mean this kind of goes through like where you teach a class with Torrey Podmajersky, so you know her work well, but she talks in her book about how… she often start a design project with like physically putting people in a room to mimic the conversation. And so does that conversational thing, does that influence or infuse your work or…

Elly:
Absolutely. One of the things at Nordstrom is, they didn’t have, at least on the UX side, an established voice really. And I was looking at this and I was like, well Nordstrom is known for its salespeople for its trusted sales people. I was like, if we were to ask our salespeople to say the words we’ve put in the UI to customers, we’d be embarrassed. That is not a way you treat people. That is not a way to encourage them to shop or help them make a decision or make them feel good about their purchases. So, that was really the philosophy. It’s like if you won’t say it and if you wouldn’t want it to be said to you in a shopping experience, don’t write it, don’t code it. And it transformed a lot of experiences. Like the confirmation page instead of focusing on the order number, it’s like we hope you enjoy it, just really channeling what you would want a human being, a sales person that you really liked and trusted to say to you in that moment. Yeah,

Larry:
And that’s so interesting that you had Nordstrom, which would probably has, maybe Tiffany’s has slightly better service, but you know like that’s the pinnacle of retail service and to have that as sort of a leverage point, when I guess, and this goes back to the original reason I wanted to have you on the podcast, is you are a fierce advocate in many ways. Everything you just talked about the points to your fierce advocacy for the end user and for always being in that conversation with them, always speaking to them, but also you just alluded to the fact that you as you develop this field and grew it and bring people on with you, you come in right alongside the designers and the developers now right at that CrowdStrike, tell me a little bit about that, about how you’ve built this, how your advocacy for this has actually panned out because I know a lot of people have tried that and not succeeded. So how did you make this happen?

Elly:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Why I’ve been so successful at, I mean it certainly is something I can’t imagine not doing things so, that’s part of it. At Nordstrom, I had really great partners and I had a one PM in particular who was great about getting data on it and was great about letting me iterate an AB test and there was a single string and we added and it’s like that’s 2 million more a quarter. And so to be able to point to those numbers is really impressive. And to be able to say to your VP like, Hey, I just made you 2 million more a quarter and he turned to be and was like, we probably need to pay you more and I’m like, yeah. It was a really good way to say, no, I add fundamental value.

Elly:
My discipline adds fundamental value and in the enterprise, so having moved into a productivity app and it’s something people use to do their jobs, which is really also where my passion is, I like shopping, I like Nordstrom, but I really like helping people do their job. And so it’s a little bit harder, we don’t have the analytics to show why it’s valuable, but you have customer complaints, you have calls to support and we’ve had enough situations where having our team involved has made customers happier, support is happier. So, that’s sort of the metrics we’ve been using.

Larry:
That’s interesting like how do you imagine, I’m thinking like do you know Kylie Hansen at Microsoft?

Elly:
I know the name.

Larry:
I had her 10 or 12 episodes ago. But anyhow, she demonstrated, it’s sort of like at a macro level the efficacy of an embedding content designers and UX teams. But as soon as you did that, NPS went up eight, usability went up 94%, task accomplishment failures decreased for, anyhow she could do, so what were the numbers, you mentioned at Nordstrom that you could show in some places because you have the numbers, you have a lot of shoppers there. You can do valid AB testing and say look, this copy makes you 2 million more bucks a year. But internally like these enterprise things, like helping people do their jobs better, harder to triangulate and find the…

Elly:
Yeah, I was listening to that episode and I’m like, Oh, those statistics sound fantastic and we our company is only eight years old. That’s not what our focus has been, so we don’t have it. So it is a little bit more anecdotal. And I’m lucky that, I mean they knew they wanted somebody to run content. They knew they needed someone to improve the kind of communication with their customers. So they already knew it was an important thing when they brought me in. And so when I said, Hey, these are going to be at the same level, all of these positions at the same levels as the engineering levels. They were like, that’s fine.

Elly:
So I had the support, which is great and we’ve just had good successes, like I said, of customers being happier, of having somebody write a draft and then me or my team comes in and writes a different reference. Like, oh yeah, that’s better. Or same thing with legal messaging. Even the legal team will be like, okay, we can see that that’s a little less intimidating yet meets the spirit of the law. So that’s the way that I’ve kind of won people over is it before and afters are really compelling I’ve found.

Larry:
And we were talking a little bit before about the plain language like that’s sort of… and a lot of what you’ve talked about because a lot of what we think of as just content strategy, deliverables, voice tone. You talked about that a little bit about this, about readability, usability, all these things, a lot of them are notoriously difficult to measure, but your boss, they were kind of bought in from the get go and then as you go along you just say, you can demonstrate via whatever. You can show that you’re earning your keep, basically.

Elly:
Yeah. There was actually a really good example of that of, we work with Miter Think Tank has this framework of all sorts of techniques that adversaries use. So it’s very industry specific. It’s called the Attack Framework. And they have these labels, these buckets for the different techniques. And we were going to integrate and I was like, I don’t know what exfiltration means. I don’t know what execution means in this context. And so pretty early on I was like, how would you explain this to somebody who’s learning it for the first time? And so that’s where we really developed the voice of mentor explaining to a mentee. So how, because that happens in the professional expert industry. And it turns out to say, oh, exfiltration is stealing data, collection is about gathering data, execution, running malicious code.

Elly:
And so I actually worked those words into the interface in the documentation and went up a level, created just another one to not get in the way. So that was like gain access, keep access. And so because we added that extra level, it made it possible for the analyst using the product, who knew the more technical terms to more quickly explain it to their leadership. And so I gave this 10 minute talk on explaining attack to your executive leadership in 10 minutes or less, and it was incredibly popular and there was lots of support around Twitter, people coming up to me. I’ve had customers ask me to give that presentation to their security operations center. So that was a really good signal to my organization that what I was doing had value for the industry.

Larry:
That’s so great because that’s sort of like within that conference and those and that cohort, they could use the other language, the more complicated language and they would all understand one another. But they were grateful that you gave them the tools to communicate with like the stakeholder, the C suite and the other people in their organization that they had to deal with.

Elly:
Yeah, for sure. Because nobody, we talked about this, nobody only talks to the people who know what they know. Like you have to communicate out with everybody and also at reduced training time. It was onboarding, it made it easier for people who are new in careers switching over who knew something but didn’t know this specific, lexicon and it saved them a lot of time.

Larry:
That’s so interesting and train… that’s the first time. It’s so funny, I was at LavaCon last fall and it comes up a lot but it hasn’t come up a huge amount in my conversations here. But that’s one of those, that must be like really expensive activity too, to assemble a dozen people, take them away from their desk for a week and put them in a conference room or whatever training entails in a place. So if you can, is that a common thing in your work, the language, where could you use that voice and tone stuff, just the approach to the content. Does it often show up in training as well as like documentation and…

Elly:
I mean I don’t know as much about the training thing, so we’re mostly thinking of like, so the analysts and the professionals who are using our team, how fast can somebody understand? I mean the whole UX of it and being really thoughtful about the words and trying to use the words, we think they would turn to the human and say like, hey, no, no, no, what that means in this context is like run malicious code. Can we help them? Can we provide those words to them as well? Can we get that into the interface? So even if that person who was newer in career was using it for the first time, they don’t understand more quickly.

Larry:
Yeah, that reminds me of, do you know Gerry McGovern?

Elly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Larry:
He has a whole customer care words thing that he was doing like 10 or 15 years ago. I think he’s kind of moved on from that. But I think it’s still a really useful, like you use different words in different contexts. It’s almost like analogous to tone in that sentence that you have the same subject matter, but you’re using different language in different contexts about it. And that’s part of your job is to get that out, yeah.

Elly:
Yeah. Well, and that’s really that conversational part. People are going to say out loud the words they see. So an example of this at Nordstrom and at a lot of companies have this, they buy online pickup in store, which often gets shortened to BOPIS, internally. And it takes as fewer characters, you can use that in the internal stuff that the sales people are… the software they’re looking at. And so they would ask customers, oh, are you here for your BOPIS? Which, not the ideal experience. So being really thoughtful that whatever you put in front of people, even people who this is their job, even though they understand it, they’re going to say the words you put in front of them. So if you can put the words that you want them to say as opposed to the shorthand, it helps everybody.

Larry:
I can totally see that. Although, I have a number of friends at Nordstrom, I’m going to use BOPIS the next time I see them. You also teach this stuff. You and Torrey Podmajersky started a class about five years ago at the school. Tell me about how that class arose and it sounds like it’s going like gangbusters right now.

Elly:
It is. Yeah and actually Jonathan Colman is the one who put me in touch with Larry Asher at SVC because what was happening is we were ready, like we’ve shown the value of UX writers at Nordstrom and now we needed more. And very few people have been taught this discipline who know exactly what a UX writer even was, and this was back in 2013, 2014 and so I was like, I need to create a candidate pool. And so I went to Larry and I was like, I’d like to start teaching a UX writing class. And he’s like, great I think I was supposed to have a UX writing class. So the timing was perfect, that early crest of, this is becoming a discipline. And Torrey had taught a lot and was brilliant and a great partner.

Elly:
And so I was like, hey, let’s teach this together. And so yeah we worked together and built all the exercises and index for that first class. And now it’s been a few years, it’s part of the UX certificate curriculum at the school at SVC and there are three sessions going on right now and we’ve recruited a whole bunch of other teachers as well. They are always looking for teachers. If anyone in the Seattle area is hearing this, hit up Larry Asher if you want to teach it. But yeah, UX writing fundamentals because it’s for people who want to be UX writers and we’ve had people who’ve successfully transitioned their career, which to me, I’m so proud to have given people, help them have those tools.

Larry:
Is the curriculum close to what you started with or has it evolved over the last five years or…

Elly:
it’s the fundamentals are still there. I’m an actually a lot of the exercises that Torrey has in her book, some of them came, that conversational exercise of going back and forth and speaking about the experience before you write what’s in the interface. That’s one of the exercises we use in the class. So we’re trying to keep it updated and provide newer examples and just keep refining it. But it’s still pretty much like, write for doing, not for reading, clarity over brevity, purposeful, concise, conversational and human. Those stand the test of time.

Larry:
Nice. Yeah. I just recently re-watched, it’s a Steve Jobs introduction with the iPhone and it’s amazing how little has changed it since then. So your curriculum is in that ballpark as well. Where you’re just talking about with the sort of the popularization that comes with doing a class. How much have you seen this field grow? Because you’re mission accomplished in the sense that you now have a better candidate pool and you go out to hire people, and the class has gone from like, the whatever you started with to three concurrent sessions every semester or whatever now. How do you see the growth of the field? Is it just more numbers or are there different, like for example, you span both technical and UX, that’s really interesting to me because a lot of people are just siloed in one or the other. Are there a lot of commingled practices like that or are you seeing, just tell me a little bit about your overview, your a hundred thousand foot view of the field right now.

Elly:
Yeah, I mean it’s an exciting time to be in this field, and in Seattle I think we’re probably even a little ahead of the curve. Torrey and I have talked about like, it’s so interesting that there’s still sort of intro to content strategy, intro to UX writing. Because we’ve now got a cohort who’s ready for advanced, they could handle entire workshops on errors and empty states and first run experiences. But there’s still a lot of people who they’ve never heard of this as a job title, and I was like, oh, you can get a job in that. A lot of companies that don’t have it as a role and so it is growing, but Google has it, Facebook has it, Amazon. And so people are seeing more examples of really good, thoughtful UX writing so it makes it table stakes instead of nice to have which is the direction we’re going and why the field is growing the way it is.

Larry:
That’s always a good threshold and you got to be in the game. We’re coming close to time and I like to give my guests an opportunity. If there’s anything last, anything that hasn’t come up or that’s just on your mind about what’s going on in the world of the UX content strategy or technical writing or in your career? Anything that’s going on? Anything you want to leave folks with or…

Elly:
yeah, so the whole conversational is interesting and and voice. I think sometimes people think voice means casual conversation. I don’t think everyone thinks about voices being like a professional conversation. I think it always should be what you put in your user interface, is something you were willing to say directly to someone. And a lot of people when they start writing and get formal and you won’t refuse to use contractions and want to use the word utilize and things like that. But that’s where using the idea of a mentor to a mentee, like I think the enterprise has a lot of room to grow. So I think a lot of the change for UX writing has been in the retail side and the commercial side and the direct to people side of things. I’m looking forward to enterprises starting to have that threshold of, so the people doing their jobs get as much attention to what they’re saying, what they’re calling things, how many clicks it takes, how quickly do they understand it that we give to consumers.

Larry:
No, that makes sense. When you think about like just Amazon’s here in Seattle and they have what, hundreds of thousands of people in the warehouses and whatever else they’re doing, and they could probably use a lot of help with that.

Elly:
I think that’s the next wave after having really great interactive, even delightful retail experiences and things like that. I think of government, I think productivity outside of saying stuff that people use to do their jobs. I think that’s the next thing that’s going to get better and easier and more thoughtful.

Larry:
Cool. Well, I can’t wait for that day when I was pretty good. Well, thanks so much Elly, it’s been great having you on the show.

Elly:
Yeah, thank you.