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Patrick StaffordPatrick Stafford has a unique view of the state of content work in the fields of UX design and product management.
As the CEO of the UX Writers Collective, his livelihood depends on understanding where the profession is going, which skills are in demand, and how writers and designers can best prepare themselves for UX writing and content design careers.
We talked about:
- his new role as CEO at the UX Writers Collective
- the current scope of courses they offer and their plans for the future
- the range of students that the UX Writers Collective serves
- how he demonstrates the benefits of UX writing to designers
- the range of job responsibilities and job titles associated with product and UX content work
- the importance of adopting a content strategy mindset regardless of your role
- how to build your content strategy thinking muscle
- the growth of the UX writing profession and salaries
- the growing body of skills you need to be a UX writer now
- the variety of pathways into a content design/UX writing career
- his desire to see more UX designers in design-management roles and less developer-centrism in product management
- the benefits of a T-shaped skills set for any design professional
- the need for ongoing learning and professional development to keep up as expectations for the profession rise
Patrick’s bio
Patrick Stafford is the CEO and cofounder of the UX Writers Collective. He is a former Lead Digital Copywriter for MYOB, the largest accounting software provider in Australia, and has consulted with several businesses on UX content strategy. He also hosts the podcast Writers of Silicon Valley, which features interviews with UX writers and content strategists.
Follow Patrick online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 94. Patrick Stafford knows the fields of UX writing, content design, and content strategy better than most. As the CEO of the UX Writers Collective, he carefully follows the UX and content professions to determine how to design and develop courses for them. As a UX writer and content strategist himself, he has developed some well-informed opinions about the importance of content-strategy thinking and about how he’d like to see the field develop.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 94 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Patrick Stafford. Patrick has recently ascended to the position of CEO at the UX Writers Collective. And it wasn’t just that that I wanted to have him on the show. He’s a font of useful information about UX writing and that whole field. So welcome, Patrick. Tell the folks a little bit more about your role there at the UX Writers Collective and what you’re up to.
Patrick:
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. I recently took the position of CEO at the UX Writers Collective. We sell education and training courses in UX writing and related disciplines like content testing and chatbot design, and a number of other courses. Prior to that, I was the lead digital copywriter at MYOB, which is Australia’s largest accounting software company. Digital copywriter is a weird title. And I know we’ll probably talk about that in a little bit. But it’s essentially a content strategist. And so I worked on a number of initiatives there related to logged-out states and a few web apps and things like that. I’ve also conducted a number of freelance UX writing and content strategy projects in my time for a number of consultancies and organizations down in Australia. But yeah, most of my time now, well, in fact, all of my time is now running and growing the UX Writers Collective.
Larry:
Okay, well, let’s start there. Because I’ve been following you I think since pretty much the start, but I looked recently at your site and I’m like, whoa. There’s like five, I don’t know, how many classes do you offer now? You’ve grown considerably the last couple of years. Can you talk about that arc?
Patrick:
Yeah, absolutely. So we offer six courses now. So we just launched our sixth course last week actually, UX writing for technical writers. So we launched that last week and we started with the flagship course, which is UX writing fundamentals. And so we started in mid 2018. To be honest, the idea was not necessarily to run a business. It was really the vision of our founder, Bobbie Wood, to create a course that could educate both existing UX writers, but also people who wanted to get into the industry who didn’t feel like they had a way in, or they really had any knowledge of how to get in. And so we started with that course and then we slowly began to realize, there’s a lot of demand here for skills that aren’t necessarily being serviced by the industry.
Patrick:
Content research and testing is a great one. Every Slack I’m in or every discussion I’m in is there’s always people asking, how do I test my content? How do I research it properly? And so whenever we’ve seen a need, we’ve really tried to identify, okay, who is the best person to speak about this and educate the community about this? And that’s how we continued to grow. And yeah, we’ve got six courses now and I’ve got several in development right now that I’m really excited about. So yeah, it’s been an interesting growth trajectory, not only in terms of the number of courses we offer, but also having to now operate things as a growing business with a team and all those fun things.
Larry:
Nice. What does the team look like? You’re full-time there. Do you have other full-time employees or . . . ?
Patrick:
Most are contractors, so I’m the sole full-time person at the collective. But we have a number of part-time people. So we have a marketing lead, we have a support lead, so someone who’s working on a number of support activities. We have an entire team of people who helping grade student work and work on student finals and provide them with feedback. We have a number of causal authors. We have a number of partners who we work with. We have some development help as well. So there are lots of people doing lots of different things. And those people will range from sometimes people who we work with occasionally to people who are basically doing a part-time job. I’m wearing a lot of different lot of different hats as I’m going into different meetings and talking with people.
Patrick:
And I think one of the great things about our team though is that, with the exception of the developers who we have, everyone on our team is either a working UX writer, they’re a professional UX writer or content strategist, or they’re someone who has been trained in UX writing and has done some freelance UX writing work. So everyone who’s grading our work, they are trained in UX writing, or they are working in UX writers at sometimes quite large organizations that people would know. And they’re giving they’re giving feedback. And we think that’s really important because we want people to be receiving feedback from people who know how to do this job and do it every day.
Larry:
It sounds a little bit like a professional development project that got out of hand and became a whole business.
Patrick:
It is a little bit like that. I did not think I would be doing this full time when we started. It was essentially just, let’s develop this and let’s see how it goes. And then it slowly grew into a pretty fast growing organization. So yeah, it did, get out of hand, but in a good way.
Larry:
In a good way. Yeah. I’m looking forward to following it and seeing where you go. Because six courses now, how big do you picture that getting? This gets into one of the things I want to talk about, is the state of the field and where it’s going. I think education would be one of those measures, right?
Patrick:
Yeah. To answer the question, how big will it get? We see demand for a number of different areas of training. So I can’t put a number on it, but I mentioned we’ve got several developments so I’d say keep an eye on that. In terms of growth, we see it in two spheres. The first is directly training people who are doing the content strategy, content design and the UX writing work. So addressing those folks who are in design teams, who are actually in charge of the words, that measuring the content, and they’re looking at content strategy from an overall perspective. So that’s the one group. And then we have another group of people who aren’t doing that, but are interacting with words and content strategy.
Patrick:
So for instance, we have a course on microcopy. That’s basically an introductory course to teach you how to write for UI components. It’s a fundamental look at how to write microcopy. We think that’s appropriate for anyone on a design team because we think anyone on a design team should learn how to write and how to make your writing for UI components better. Now, you may not want to go and do the full UX writing fundamentals course because you don’t want to be a UX writer full time, but you still think you might want to improve your knowledge and your skills.
Patrick:
And I’m also thinking perhaps for someone who’s developing an app on their own, they’re not a writer. They’re not going to be a content strategist, but they want to know, “I’m not really a writer. How can I make this really sing?” And so something like that microcopy course would be really appropriate for them. So we think about those two spheres whenever we’re creating content and courses. And we’re going to be thinking about that a lot more. So, yeah, that’s generally how we think about the things in terms of growth. It’s core writers and content strategists, and then people who are affected or touch the UX writing or content strategy.
Larry:
And I think it’s still the case in a lot of the folks that I talk with, that there are a lot of, not just designers, but developers and product managers writing UI copy. That course, is it mostly interaction designers and researchers who are tasked with copywriting, or are you finding developers and product people and other folks tasked with writing the UI copy?
Patrick:
Yeah. With the microcopy course specifically, yeah. We’re definitely seeing a lot of different types of people take that course. We market it specifically as this is good for anyone, anyone on a design team or touches those words. Whereas with the fundamentals course, that’s more designed for people who are doing that full-time. So that’s the UX writers and content strategists who are doing that. So we are seeing a number of people who, I can’t tell you how many times at work where I’m going to be working with the designer and they’ve attempted to write copy. God bless them for trying. It’s not their skillset. In the same way that I think that UX writers and content strategists should know a little bit of HTML and CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, a little bit of understanding product strategy and how the sales teams work. In that same way, I think everyone should learn just a little bit about how the words work in a product interface.
Larry:
That gets into an interesting thing that comes up all the time in this world, is that notion that, one of the challenges that writers have in the tech world is like, “Oh, those are just words. You can just fill those in and anybody can write.” And this is sort of the positive manifestation of that idea, that yes, anybody can do this, but you need a little training. It’s not just like opening up Word and writing some words. Does that ring with what you’re seeing?
Patrick:
Definitely. So I think one of the ways that I think… I’ve encountered that mentality as well, where people think that it’s really the visual design that will guide users through a particular experience. And what’s interesting is that you say… I’ve actually sat down with designers and said, “Okay, I’ll prove it to you that this really matters.” And so you sit down and usability testing and you give some users one experience and you gave some users a different experience and then you measure what happens. They slowly begin to see that a few of those different words did have an impact. We saw how this particular word caused confusion or this particular word set expectations in a certain way. So once you start even demonstrating that… And that’s not even a full quantitative test or anything. That’s just literally sitting down and watching people. You can show people then that these words really do matter. And so having some type of knowledge about how they work or how they operate, or even just some understanding that we do need someone dedicated on this. It becomes a little more apparent.
Larry:
You just said that words matter. That reminds me of something else I want to ask about, we’re the word people. Theoretically, we have the tools and capabilities to clearly codify and articulate what it is that we do and how we talk about it and how we describe ourselves. But I can think of at least four ways that we identify ourselves as: UX writers, product content strategists, UX content strategist, content designer, and there’s probably others. What do you make of this, the labeling of the work that we do? What’s going on there?
Patrick:
This has been a really interesting point of discussion in the industry for a while. And I have to credit people like Kristina Halvorson at Brain Traffic and then Scott Kubie who have really led that discussion. Maybe not led it, but contributed pretty significantly to it. I’ll tell you the way I think about that. And I think this tends to be the way that the industry I think is seeing it more now. I tend to separate job titles and responsibilities. So. I’ll talk about responsibilities first.
Patrick:
Responsibilities come in a hierarchy. So to me, you start at the top with content strategy, which is a really big umbrella term, which encompasses content strategy across a number of different channels, both inside the product and outside the product. Below that, you have content design. So those are people inside a design team who are thinking about, how is content presented. And content could be words, but also other types of components and information. How is it presented? How is it laid out? And so you’re talking about things like information architecture and wire frames and prototypes and so on. And then below that you have UX writers who are focused specifically on writing for a user interface.
Patrick:
Now, those are the job responsibilities. The titles though are different. So let’s say you have a job title. I had a job title as digital copywriter, which I just mentioned before, which is an odd title. But if you look at my job responsibilities, I was really a content strategist, but I also needed to have content design and UX writing skills. When I joined MYOB, my responsibilities were more UX writing and content design. That content strategy piece became more important as I moved up to lead.
Patrick:
So to me, it’s less about the title and more about the responsibility that the job. Now, that being said, the industry has obviously moved towards content designer as a title that encompasses a lot of, sort of all of those types of responsibilities. So that content design seems to be the term that we’re approaching now as a kind of… I don’t want to say standard, but more organizations are using it. But that being said, at the end of the day, the titles matter less as they do about the understanding of responsibilities and who’s doing what, in my opinion.
Larry:
That makes perfect sense. Just today, we’re recording this on March 2nd, I’m just going to observe. But just today, Scott Kubie, who you mentioned a minute ago, excuse me, was talking on Twitter about how the prevalence of content design, of that taking hold, as opposed to content strategy as sort of the umbrella term to describe what we do. And he was arguing that it’s easier for managers to take that, they can hire, that they can imagine having more designers around. But it’s hard for them to imagine having more strategists around because I think upper level management sees strategy as their purview. And so it’s easier for them, I think, to picture. But that gets at a multifaceted issue there of how content people fit in to the design and engineering and operations of a business.
Patrick:
Yeah. I think that’s why it’s so important for anyone who’s working in UX writing or content designed to have a content strategy mindset and to really embed everything they do with content strategy. So for instance, to bring it back to the Writer’s Collective. In our material where we’re telling people, “You’re writing for components, but you’re also a part of a bigger team.” And so when people come to you with requests, you shouldn’t just say as a UX writer, “Okay, I will do this.” You should be thinking, what’s the context of this? What’s the flow? What comes before this and what comes after it? How are we measuring this? Where does this sit in the overall user experience? That’s content strategy thinking. And I take Scott’s point that you really do need someone, in my opinion, you really do need someone overseeing the entire strategy. But at the same time, what I would say is you can also get that by making sure that individual content designers have that strategic thinking mindset as well.
Larry:
I agree. That’s something that I’ve been kind of developing as a, I have been talking about it a little bit in presentations and stuff, that notion that you can be strategic and be a leader from anywhere. There’s room for that in the way that modern organizations operate.
Patrick:
Yeah, absolutely. Everything you do should have a strategic element to it. It takes you a while to develop that mindset and also confidence. And there are lots of different things that come into it. But the more that you start thinking through things as a piece rather than individual pieces of work, I think the better off you are, the better off the team is, the better off the organization is.
Larry:
That’s right. The way you just said that. Whenever I explore that idea, I think, wow, if everybody operated this way, everybody would be better off. Because we’d all be thinking strategically and holistically and systemically about things.
Patrick:
It can be frustrating though, because sometimes people misinterpret strategy is stopping during a meeting and then asking, “Should we really be doing this?” That’s not strategy, that’s just derailing a project. Strategic thinking, I think takes years to really hone and understand how to apply it. And particularly with content. One of the things I’m really passionate about is researching content and testing it. That’s a big strategic element and something we really encourage all of our students to get involved in. Because as a UX writer, the more you research your content, the more you test it, that’s strategic thinking. And so the earlier on you get involved in that the better results you’re going to have.
Larry:
I’m going to guess that’s worked into your curriculum pretty well at this point?
Patrick:
Yeah. It is embedded in it through all of it, that strategic thinking mindset. We do have a separate course on content research and testing, because there’s so much that you can learn about it. It is right to say that, that strategic thinking, we emphasize it in everything, in every piece of content that we create.
Larry:
And like you just said, it takes a while to really embed it, actual strategic thinking, in your professional mindset. So you’re hammering that home at every opportunity, it sounds like.
Patrick:
Yeah. I think of the people who I’ve managed in the past. Great example. So at MYOB last year, I had just a fantastic person who was in my team and who I was managing. She was a fantastic writer. One of the things that she identified as a career goal is she wanted to move to a senior role. And so we said, “Okay, let’s look at the job description for the senior role and what that entails.” In the description, it talked about more strategic thinking. And she was kind of like, “How do I show that? How do I find examples of that?”
Patrick:
And we were in a meeting where the optimization specialist was providing a rundown of an A/B testing result. And the A/B testing results said that most users clicked on this particular button. And the optimization specialist said, “So we know that users like that the most. We know that you just liked that the most.” And one of the things that we pointed out in that meeting was, well, “Hang on. We don’t know that. What we know is that most users clicked on that button. We don’t know whether most users liked it. We don’t know anything about the context. All we know is what happened.” And one thing I said to the person I was managing was pointing that out, pointing out that contradiction in the data or the blind spot, so to speak, that’s an example of strategic thinking in terms of content and research, and so on.
Patrick:
Questioning the information, thinking about how it’s presented and then using that to guide all of your decisions. Those types of examples. And that takes years of confidence, when you’re in a meeting to be able to speak up and go, “Hang on, actually, can we talk about that data a little bit? I’m curious about that, where that came from.” Or when an executive comes to you and says, “I think we should do X,” and you have to say, “Okay, great. Could you show me any data that says why we should do that?” That takes both confidence from the type of work that you do, but also as a personality, it takes confidence to really… It’s one thing to think strategically. It’s another thing to implement it and say the right things and be in the right meetings. So it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.
Larry:
You’ve used the phrase, strategy thinking or strategic thinking a couple of times. It almost makes me think that we need to have a discipline, something like design thinking. That has become a thing. It’s a thing that’s come and gone in many ways, but that notion of developing the mindset around genuine strategy. And especially in contrast to what you said earlier about that sometimes people will just bring something up and label it strategic, but it’s really just an interruption of the meeting. So to have that truly embedded, strategic thinking, do you have any thoughts about how you can instill that in someone?
Patrick:
I’m always a big fan of the double diamond approach to design. I use it as an illustration a lot, and that’s just because I love it so much. Because it’s just such an easy way for I think anyone, including content designers and content strategists, to think about the work that we do. So if anyone’s listening who doesn’t know what the double diamond is, it’s basically a design thinking tool. And the idea is that you start with a problem and then you begin to research more about that problem. And you get data from all different types of sources. So you start at one point and then you sort of expand your understanding of this problem out. And then you get to a point where you’ve done enough research and you begin to whittle that research down and you start thinking, okay, what’s the actual problem we’re trying to solve here? Because the problem you think you have may not be the problem you actually want to solve. And so that’s the first diamond.
Patrick:
The second diamond is then when you start creating a bunch of different solutions. So that’s your sketching and your wire framing and your prototyping. And then you begin to put it out in the world and then test it and then iterate. And that’s your second diamond. So when it comes to strategic thinking and how to develop that muscle, that is a great mental model for any type of conversation. Not just project. I know the double diamond approach is used for major UX projects. But I would encourage people to use it just as a conversation tool. Start thinking about, okay, number one, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve here? Number two, what information do we have that can inform this problem? And what information do we need that we don’t have? And start thinking about that.
Patrick:
And then we start bringing it down to, based on that, what’s the real problem we’re trying to solve? And then moving into, okay, well, what are a number of different ways we can solve this problem? And then finally settling on one. At MYOB and in any number of… because at the UX Writers Collective I’m engaged in a number of design projects. I’m always using that as a mental model. As we’re sitting there and talking, I’m always thinking, okay, what data do we have? What data do we need? What’s the actual problem? Is it different from the problem we thought we had? And those come up every day in design decisions.
Larry:
Something I want to make sure we get in before we wrap up too that’s related to this. Once you have that genuine strategic mindset, you’re commanding your career, you’ve got great career opportunities, you’ve got a high salary. But I do want to talk a little bit about that. What are the prospects for somebody in UX writing these days? It seems, from my perspective, like it’s a pretty big growing field and that it pays well. What’s the data show about that?
Patrick:
I’m glad you asked. So we conducted a survey in 2019 to understand, how much are people being paid? We conducted a salary survey and people can check it out on our blog. We had a number of different responses over about 100, 110, 112, something like that. The data’s there so people can go and see. And what we’ve found is that all over the world it’s a generally high paying field, and then in the United States, the average sits at just over a hundred thousand. So people are earning quite a lot of money as UX writers and content designers. And in some cases, much more than that, particularly in like San Francisco area. But we did find that even outside of San Francisco and the tech hubs, this is still a very well paying job, 80, 90, 100,000 dollars. It’s an expanding field and pays very well.
Patrick:
In terms of career prospects, what I would say is that, as I described the job responsibilities before, there are fewer and fewer, in my view, roles that are just focused on UX writing for user interfaces and more roles that now encourage and require that UX writers and content designers have that strategic mindset, but also have the ability to create wireframes, be part of sketching processes, take part in user research and testing. So the bar is kind of raising in terms of what skills you need to have. That’s very exciting because it means that we’re growing that’s a discipline . It can be a challenge for people because it means there’s more to learn.
Patrick:
A great example I’ll give is the rise of Figma in particular as a design software tool. It’s free, it’s in a browser. Anyone can access it. So there is really no excuse now for a UX writer not to know at least the basics of how Figma works and how you can work in Figma. Whereas before, Sketch, you need a Mac for it. Particularly expensive, you’re not necessarily going to get access to it. So that’s an example of how, if you’re going into a design team, you need to at least be, not an expert, but you do need to have some familiarity with how these tools work.
Larry:
Because so many people come to these roles, I think we’re seeing more diversity in the UX writer pool, but most people come out of journalism or publishing or media of different kinds. And they’re used to the kind of writerly stuff. And this gets at why these jobs pay more, is because you’re not just doing a different writing thing. You’re now a design professional, and it behooves you to learn some more skills across that discipline to… And you have to, to do your job well as a UX writer. Is that accurate?
Patrick:
A hundred percent. I personally come from journalism. I went to journalism school. I was a journalist for six years. So coming from that profession… I actually think it’s one of the strengths of content design/UX writing, that people come from all different types of backgrounds. You don’t need to have gone to this degree or to this field or whatever. you can hire from so many different areas. And I do think that’s why it ends up paying pretty well, because not only are you part of a design team… and so design teams in terms of an end product, some of the most important teams and they’re making a big impact. But we’ve seen how much the woods in a product can affect user behavior, user outcomes. And who better to understand that than people who have worked with language and words and can see the impact that it can have?
Patrick:
It’s amazing the types of careers we’re seeing people have. I’m encouraged by, for instance, Shopify and Facebook have recently changed their terms to say content design. And for instance, Facebook has a VP of Content Design. We’re seeing more and more leadership roles. However, I take Scott Kubie’s point, I think we do need more content strategy leaders in organizations rather than a generic design leader, as important as those are. Having a content design lead, content strategy lead rather, in those roles I think would be just a great win for our industry. And we’re seeing that more and more.
Larry:
Yeah. I’ve already seen several people who are UX writers, they get embedded in design teams, then all of a sudden they’re directing the research department or doing other things. So it’s exciting that way as well because you’re entering this whole new field. It’s not just writing, editing, managing. There’s all this other stuff going on in the design world that you can-
Patrick:
Yeah, exactly. And to be quite honest, I would like to see more UX-based product managers. Most product managers have technical backgrounds. I want to see more product managers with UX backgrounds, even UX writing backgrounds. One of the fantastic opportunities that running the UX Writers Collective has given me is that it’s essentially a product management role, managing a number of different products. And having my UX writing background has informed that in a way that not a lot of product managers have. That’s not to demean product managers, but I would love to see more UX writers take on those types of roles. I think that’ll start to happen more in the next few years.
Larry:
I think you’re right. I’m seeing it already. It’s really interesting in my… I’ve cast this really weird wide net over this field the last couple of years, and I’ve come across a really extreme range. There’s some places where UX and product are just completely commingled and intertwingled and working hand in hand throughout. And then there’s, I know product managers who still don’t know what UX is or how to do it or how to engage them. It’s really interesting.
Patrick:
Yeah. If we’re going to stick on the product management discussion, it’s interesting seeing people who… The bias that I’ve seen product managers have is definitely towards development. They acknowledge UX and they can sort of be a part of it and they can sort of understand it, but heir real focus is on the development side. It would be interesting to see more product managers who have that content strategy or content background. I wonder, how is that going to change the types of products that we make? What do products look like with product managers who have a UX background and a content strategy background?
Larry:
That’s what I was just thinking. If you think about, provincially, about our profession, as I am wont to do. There’s the Darwinian evolution that products that embed… In fact, Kylie Hanson has already shown this at Microsoft, the products that embed content designers do better than those that don’t. It’s that kind of data and success that will just continue to grow the discipline, I think.
Patrick:
A hundred percent. And I also think that as a result, it’s incumbent on UX writers, content designers, to not only learn and practice more strategic thinking, but also think about the areas where they could develop more as well. I talk to some people in the industry and they say, “I don’t want to learn about that because it’s not really my profession.” And I think you really need to follow a T-shaped skills model of development, which is to say you should be really specialized in one area, which is your content design, but then you should also know enough about other areas to be dangerous.
Patrick:
I’m always encouraging people, “You don’t need to, but I would encourage you to know a little bit of HTML or CSS. You don’t need to, but I would encourage you to learn how to edit strings in code. You don’t need to, but I would encourage you to learn how the sales teams work and interact with people.” The more you can know about the full process, the better. I was just in a webinar and we were talking about the idea of there are full stack developers. We should encourage and talk about the idea of having a full-stack writer and being across a number of different disciplines. And I think once we have more full-stack writers, those are the types of people who will move into more content strategy focused product management roles.
Larry:
I love that, it’s turning the T on its side, skills up and down that horizontal. It’s funny. I had Scott Berkun on a couple of episodes ago and he just wrote a book about design. The idea of the T-shaped UX practitioner came up there. He likes a T shape with serifs. That you have a strong vertical, and then a couple of other things that you’re good at as well. Now you’ve turned it on its side. So there’s a lot of ways to approach this. I really like that.
Patrick:
I’m a big fan of doubling down on your strengths and kind of ignoring your weaknesses, but that doesn’t mean you say you shouldn’t know anything about your weaknesses. You should know enough to have a conversation. I know enough JavaScript to look at some JavaScript and sort of figure out, “I think I know what this is doing.” But I wouldn’t be able to replicate it. And that’s fine. That’s okay. It’s just enough to know to have those conversations and be involved and not feeling as though I’m lost half the time.
Larry:
I think in the modern complex business world, that’s all any of us can aspire to, is not being lost. Just doing our jobs.
Patrick:
There’s too much to know everything in detail. I’m trying to understand non fungible tokens and I still don’t think I do, everything that’s happening in the Bitcoin world. I don’t think everyone can understand everything.
Larry:
I’m going to school on knowledge graphs and semantic technology now. If you want to break your brain, highly recommend it.
Patrick:
I think I’ll pass on that for now.
Larry:
Well, Patrick, we’re coming up close to time. I want to make sure I give you a chance. Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about UX writing or content design that you want to make sure we get to before we wrap up?
Patrick:
First of all, thanks for having me on, it’s been a great chat. And secondly, I don’t want to discourage people and say that, when I said earlier that there are fewer dedicated UX writing roles. What I mean to say is that I don’t think you can just focus on the writing anymore. I think more is expected of people. And that’s a good thing. I think that’s a really good thing, but I also think it just means that you just going to have to continue to grow and learn and practice that strategic thinking.
Patrick:
I’m really passionate about teaching writers and people who are good with words and language, bringing more to their profession. So understanding, you can write well but do you understand why? Do you understand why people react to this language in the way that they do? So I think the bar’s really raising and is going to continue to raise over the next few years. But I think the more that people delve into it and just embrace it, the more successful we’ll be. And we will have eventually those product managers with a content strategy mindset, and that’s exciting.
Larry:
It is exciting. We’re all lifelong learners now. And this is just some nice, focused professional career learning that we get to do to stay on top of this.
Patrick:
Absolutely.
Larry:
What’s the best way for people to follow the UX Writers Collective and to follow you? What’s the best way to stay in touch?
Patrick:
So uxwriterscollective.com. We have a weekly newsletter called The Dash. I’d encourage everyone to sign up, it’s free. You can go to our blog, uxwriterscollective.com/blog, and sign up there. And if you would like to contact me, I’m on Twitter @PDStafford. And please feel free to email me with anything at patrick at uxwriterscollective dot com. We’d love to hear from anyone and everyone, happy to have a chat anytime.
Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Patrick. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Patrick:
Thank you. This has been great. Thanks so much.
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