Scott Kubie: Writing for Designers – Episode 73

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Scott Kubie believes in you.

If you’re a writer contributing the words on a product team, he believes in you. If you’re a front-end designer or developer tasked with writing, he believes in you.

In his book Writing for Designers, Scott sets out a simple path to help you get the writing done. He also has good ideas about how to organize content work for digital products.

He’s not a fan of prescriptive style manuals and guidelines. Instead, he shows how helpful tools can guide writing work.

Nor does he like “best practices.” Instead, he shares collaborative methods that make “good design work happen.”

Scott and I talked about:

• his background in communications, information architecture, UX design
• an early UX writing job he held at Wolfram Research and the variety of terms used there to describe his work: UI Writer, Content Strategist, Copywriter
• the need for both product-oriented writers and writers who work on marketing and website content
• the proliferation of job titles related to UX writing and content strategy
• the importance of thinking like a designer when you are working on a UX or product team
• his distinction between two common content strategy job titles: “content design is an elevated form of writing; UX writing is very app and interface specific””
• the importance of tailoring content workflows and governance to the unique needs of each organization
• the importance of documenting your content model and of embedding it into your organization culture
• the almost-universal disconnect between design and content job descriptions and what people actually do
• the importance of collaboratively making “good design work happen” – as opposed to adopting best practices
• how his main inspiration comes from users, not from product goals, team structure, etc.
• how there’s nothing wrong with being “just the writer”
• how he shows the bigger value of writing at a macro level – continuity, consistency, conceptual development, etc.
• the importance of taking in and considering the big picture, of not “staring at the button,” and how he helps his collaborators in this process
• the superiority of helpful tools over style guides and other rules
• his inspirational closing message: “I believe in you. You can do good design.”

Scott’s Bio

Scott Kubie is the author of Writing for Designers and a general champion of all things UX + content. He loves to empower design teams with tools that add clarity, reduce complexity, and lead to better products. Scott publishes the UX Writing Events newsletter, a personal blog called Brutalist Bookends, and the creatively-named You Get Email from Scott Kubie, a personal newsletter.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

When you’re a writer on a design or a product team, you need all the inspiration you can get. Scott Kubie can help you. His book Writing for Designers sets out a simple, sensible path to get writing work done. He also has plenty of pragmatic advice to help word people collaborate effectively with their design and technical colleagues. But the most significant insight you may take away from this interview is Scott’s relentless focus on his source of inspiration: his users and customers.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 73 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us, Scott Kubie. Scott is the author of Writing For Designers and well, that’s how he’s best known. He’s known for a lot of things, but that’s what I wanted to talk to him today about, is writing for designers. Tell the folks a little bit more about your background Scott. Welcome to the show and tell us how you got to the point of writing that book.

Scott:
Sure. Thanks, Larry. Very happy to be here today. My book is the distillation of most specifically a work experience I had at a company called Wolfram Research, where I had come on as, initially I think the job title was User Interface Writer, and they were a few years ahead of the curve in this space. They were recognizing a problem that a lot of organizations have now, which is that they have tons of UX designers working on all kinds of different products and those products are not just flows and interface components, but they all contain a lot of words.

Scott:
Depending on the competency, confidence, training, what have you, with words and language that folks have in an organization, that is either a totally fine thing or it’s a real bumpy ride. I was brought on because they were having a bumpy ride. I got field training and just talking about words and language to UX designers, to folks that have a product and UX mindset about content and about language and about words and just slotted in my background, which varies across communications, information architecture, some UX design work, and took it from there.

Scott:
It’s something that I’ve gotten … I felt I had a certain knack for, of not only just doing that work, but of talking to people about it and advocating for the role of content in a UX design process. That’s what I’ve really been focused on for the last many years now.

Larry:
Got it. You were most recently at Brain Traffic. How long ago was the Wolfram gig?

Scott:
That was maybe for, how long ago? Before Brain Traffic, I did freelance for about a year and a half. That was about four or five, six, seven, eight years ago now, somewhere in there.

Larry:
Okay. Still early in that because I think the term ‘UX writer’ has only been really common in the last two or three years, I think. I think a lot of people think of a UX writer as like a UI writer. That most of that job is writing that UI copy and maybe onboarding scripts and some other stuff, but mostly about UI. Did that remain the scope of the job in your tenure at Wolfram?

Scott:
No. No, it sure didn’t. Yeah, I advocated early on because we did not have the UX writer term. I went with content strategist. That got mixed into the job title at some point and then it inverted to where content strategy came first. I think maybe ‘copywriter’ was at the end or something. One of the tug of war there around the job titles is something I’ve heard from a lot of other folks, which is that organizations are reticent sometimes to let go of writers because they know there’s such a persistent need for content.

Scott:
I think that in individual careers, something that I experienced, a lot of other folks I talked to experienced, that some writers, a writer like me, are very interested in the product. They want to get more and more involved in the product and the design side of things. Sometimes the business wants to keep someone with a writing talent less focused, so that they can potentially apply them to marketing campaigns or informational website content or things that that person might not find themselves writing if they were only part of a product or design team.

Scott:
Yeah. Content strategy came into the mix there and then at Brain Traffic, content strategy consultants were working on big web projects with all kinds of big organizations, health insurance, finance, universities, and so on, and worked with all kinds of different writing teams there and found that out in the world, the job titles, who knows? Everybody’s called everything.

Scott:
Content design at one organization basically means UX writing or even product design, content design, where at another organization it typically means writing for websites. It’s all over the place out there. Broadly me, I’m trying to help people who are interested in better content for their users, whatever the context.

Larry:
Yeah. There is an interesting dynamic unfolding here because like you’re saying, companies get that they need a writer and they keep you around and whatever they call you, it doesn’t really matter. They use you in the moment. But there’s also us as a discipline trying to articulate what we do and how we can help people and how we can slot in. That really seems like a pretty awkward fit at this point. One of the examples I always think of is like, if you look line by line of the description for a UX writer at Google and a content strategist at Facebook, it’s identical.

Scott:
For sure. Yeah.

Larry:
It’s almost identical. Have you seen that getting codified at all or how would you like to see it codified? Maybe that’s a better question.

Scott:
Oh, yeah. If the industry wants to hand me the magic wand, I have opinions. I think that, titles aside, the most important thing to me is that if you’re part of a product team, if you’re part of a design team, I think that it’s important intellectually, personally, philosophically, to think of yourself as a designer. If your job title is still UX writer, if it’s content specialist, if it is information architect, whatever it might be, that’s fine. Even content strategist.

Scott:
That title is just speaking to a specialization or a focus on words and language and meaning, but you are still part of the design team. That’s the most important thing. Within that framework, what makes the most sense to me, just painting with a broad brush across all the folks and organizations I’ve talked to, I like UX writer for a member of a design team that’s focused on interface copy and concepts and labels.

Scott:
I’ve gotten more pushback on this one, but I like content designer as an elevated idea of writer. In a lot of big companies that I’ve worked with, especially through my time at Brain Traffic, there are whole content design programs at institutions that don’t have any UX to speak of or if they do have UX, UX is a baby discipline there. A lot of times, it means like the young people who are good with running the Adobe Experience Manager and optimizing our landing pages. Nothing against the folks in those roles, but that’s just as extensive of an idea as UX is at a lot of organizations.

Scott:
You can have that small of an idea of UX and still have a huge content design program and the ones I’ve encountered and where it works well and makes sense to me is that identifying as a content designer, thinking about being as content design and not just writing, ends up opening a lot of eyes and it opens organizations up to working on content in different ways. It’s a very liberating idea and title. I like content design. I’ve described it often as a method of writing.

Scott:
Folks will tell me, “Well, no. I don’t just write, I do this and I do that and I do this other thing.” I say, “Well, great because you’re part of a design team.” If you are wire framing things, that doesn’t mean that wire framing is part of content design. To me, that just means that you are stepping into a more traditional interface design role. If you build the information architecture, great. You are stepping into an information architecture role. For me, content design is an elevated form of writing. UX writing is very app and interface specific.

Larry:
Right. That’s so interesting. I love the way you put that because so many writers when they get promoted, it’s to content strategist and that’s the most meaningless term I think in many cases because it’s just like, well we know they’re doing more than writing, so let’s give them a different title. But I think you articulated it better, that specific role in a UX context.

Larry:
It’s funny, just yesterday I was listening to Jared Spool talk about UX maturity, practice maturity in organizations. It seems like there’s something analogous in organizations as to their content. Not just content strategy, but content strategy, UX writing, content design, whatever you call it. It’s integration and the maturity of practice among each. Because like you’re saying, nothing against the people executing marketing content, but there’s a difference between that and getting up to enterprise information architecture or a companywide content strategy.

Larry:
I guess putting you back in the, you’re the guy representing the discipline of whatever we are and articulating that, I guess what’s your optimal situation for content in an organization? What would be the best manifestation? Because there’s a lot more that happens besides the UX writing and the content design. There is that other stuff you mentioned, like the informational and marketing content on the website. There’s tech support stuff. There’s sales scripts and all this other stuff that’s out there. Have you seen or do you have in your head a model of the best way to do that as an integrative practice in an organization?

Scott:
Well, since you invoked Jared Spool, I will invoke the Jared Spool-ism of, it depends. I think that model really varies, right? The ideal model really varies. It is rare that I’ve seen that one approach works across an entire enterprise. When we’re setting up content workflows and governance, when I was doing that kind of work at Brain Traffic, there’s like a fundamental question, your content operations planning, which is, are you going to be host distributed or centralized?

Scott:
Which there are a lot of variations within those, but some organizations go the route of having say a content center of excellence or having some kind of like an agency model, where you bring us content requests and then we find the right person to work on it and they solve your problem and then they’re onto the next one. Maybe they’re doing four or five of those things at a time. Jonathan Coleman recently has been really pushing this idea of like, apparently they destroyed content design, whatever that means, which my understanding of it is it’s just that they got rid of the distributed model and they embedded the content designers.

Scott:
Great. I’m glad that that embedding content designers or UX writers or whatever it might be works for different organizations. I don’t think there is an ideal model. I think that putting on my content strategist hat for a minute, the ideal model for me is one that is well-documented and well socialized. That’s very often what is missing is the actual articulation, the writing down of, and sharing out of what our model is and how it works.

Scott:
Who is assigned to what? What are their actual roles and responsibilities and so on? The idea of a roles and responsibilities matrix, in the book, I talk about the idea of embodying the role of the writer, irrespective of job title. I think roles are something we don’t talk about enough in design and in design work. Articulating those roles to me is more important and is what people need to do to get a piece of work done together and that’s a lot more important than how the org chart looks.

Larry:
Right. To what you’ve said, everything to this point, that when you put together, if a product is coming together, you’ve got a team and you just look like, okay, we got to get words from someplace. We have to get pictures from someplace. We have to have wireframes or however we organize things and all of that from someplace. What do you got? What do you got? Do you picture it as, not ad hoc, but sort of a pragmatic approach to team roles and responsibilities?

Scott:
Yeah, absolutely. Often, if I’m doing this in a training context, I’ll remind people, if you were planning … If you all just came together to plan a party and maybe you’re even doing that in the context of work, your job titles don’t have anything to do with planning a party. They don’t tell you anything useful, so you’re all going to have to sit down and figure out who’s picking up the cake, who’s paying for the cake, who’s ordering streamers, who’s going to keep this person busy, so that we can surprise them? Everything else.

Scott:
I think that we, we being designers broadly, often assume that we already know how a thing works or how a piece of work should be done based on those job titles. That ends up being not very productive. I think if you were to have a conversation as a team of who’s going to be doing what and it ended up perfectly mirroring your org chart and the responsibilities were already reflected in someone’s job description, I’d be very surprised by that. But I would say, “Congratulations, you have excellent job descriptions and job titles.” I’ve never found that to be the case. When I go in and consult with a team, the org chart tells me nothing. The job titles tell me nothing. I have to talk to people to understand what they do.

Larry:
Right. A lot of what you just said reminds me that a truism that emerges over and over again in my interviews is that people make up about 90% of content strategy practice. That it’s mostly about that, aligning stakeholders, about figuring out workflows, about figuring out who needs to do what. That it’s mostly a people enterprise.

Scott:
Yeah. I think that’s true even of UX writing, which is a much more applied. UX writing is a much more design flavored version of the kind of work that we do and the people on this podcast do. It’s got a very heavy design flavor to it. It’s applied. You’re in the wireframes, you’re in Figma, you’re editing and changing things. You’re really doing stuff that’s part of the product. That’s still 20%, 25% of the work.

Scott:
A lot of the rest of it is about collaboration and being part of a product team. That’s the thing that I’m coaching junior UX writers on all the time, is to show in their portfolio, to talk about out loud, to focus on from a skill development perspective is understanding just how does good design work happen and how can you best contribute to that?

Scott:
That to me is a lot more interesting conversation than for instance, what is good UX writing or what are the best practices in UX writing? I think it’s better to arrive at those kinds of ideas through collaborative work with your team, right? Making design decisions as part of a design process and not trying to turn yourself into some sort of rule in best practice, quoting UX writing robot who’s not going to be a very fun person to work with I wouldn’t think.

Larry:
No, that’s right. I think that’s a thing that comes up over and over again too, is these are all creative professions and stitching together creatives to make a business product can be a challenge.

Scott:
Yeah, yeah. For sure. Someone asked me this morning in a conversation about what inspires or motivates my work and an easy answer for that one that I will use until my retirement I imagine, which is just users. I think users and what your users need is the point where we all come together. I like to work outward from that, as opposed to trying to work some sort of ideal plan of what the right model is or how these teams should be structured. To me, it seems … I’d be honestly skeptical of a big company. You look at a Facebook or a Google, so many different kinds of products.

Scott:
Does it really make sense that there’s one model for how the words get written that’s going to work for every single one of those products? I’ve got recruiters from Google talking to me about jobs in VR, doing AI, doing machine learning things, doing web content, doing support content. That’s all very different stuff and to think that that all needs to get written in the same way with the same workflows and roles and responsibilities stretches credulity for me. I don’t find that plausible.

Larry:
Well, it’s interesting the list of potential applications of UX writing skills that you just listed, there’s this … I’m going to try and do this kindly and gently, but there’s this perception among other design and business professionals, “Oh, you’re just the writer. You just put the words in there. Do this thing that we need to do and it needs some words.” I think that drives everybody nuts in our profession.

Larry:
I’m wondering, you’ve seen that dynamic obviously more than once, do you have any … I think a lot of people have, struggled isn’t the right word, but it seems like we’re constantly having to try to reinforce to people the importance of content and how it fits in.

Larry:
Do you have any success stories about places where you’ve gone in where there was some of that skepticism or dismissiveness almost and where you came in and said, “Nope, I’m a really valuable content person. Here’s how this can help you?”

Scott:
Yeah. Certainly, you’re absolutely right. I hear this from people all the time. I think that there does seem to be that attitude out there. I’ll tell you, maybe it’s just the kind of weird position I sit in as someone who’s written a book in this space, who ends up talking more to the writers and to the designers than I on any given day, that maybe I am out being in an in-house role, I hear this a lot from writers.

Scott:
I hear this a lot from word people of like, if you listen very carefully to the framing, it’s like, “I’m not just the writer.” Well, what’s wrong with being the writer? Who decided that writing was a bad word? Who decided that writing was a small idea? Who decided that words … I don’t just do words. Well, geez, if you did, plenty of people just do words and make a pretty penny out of it and create beautiful experiences with them.

Scott:
All that said, I find that my typical approach to this is to help folks understand how the words connect to even bigger ideas. Just the conceptual framework that the product operates in, that the words are derived from this thing that we have called information architecture and you have an information architecture, whether you designed it or not, that’s a thing that just exists. The conceptual clarity and all these things. I talk a lot about clarity, about concepts. It’s about continuity, consistency, all of these things that exist at the micro level with UX writing and microcopy, but they exist at the macro level too.

Scott:
I do a lot of diagramming and visualizations. I make little charts, I make pictures, maps to show people that these choices are not coming from my love of grammar or the AP style book. I could give two hoots and I need an editor to fix that stuff for me anyway because I don’t know. I can’t diagram a sentence. I’m not entirely clear what a gerund is.

Scott:
That’s not my relationship to words. I relate to them as concepts and selling that on the bigger picture, people know that there are problems there because that’s hard stuff to talk about. If you can be the person that helps them start to see some of those invisible things that power their product, like the information architecture, the taxonomy, the concepts, the messaging, they will understand that you are a very valuable member of the team.

Larry:
That’s right. What you just said there, it goes right back to the collaboration because in light of the messaging, you’re probably talking to the branding folks and the marketing folks and the information architecture, maybe talking to the more technically inclined folks on the team. That ability, I think that’s something that some … A lot of people are coming to UX writing, for example, from journalism or poetry or other places like that. They are really good at the word part, but maybe lacking a little bit in that big picture that you just described with you’re inheriting things from the information architecture, from the messaging architecture.

Larry:
I picture you as like a coach about this. That seems to be like, if I had to summarize you in one word for somebody asking about what kind of UX writer is Scott. Have you coached people through that? You mentioned that you’re doing some mentoring and stuff now. Helping people get that kind of grounding and the whole product and design ecosystem.

Scott:
Sometimes. Yeah. Especially when I was in that role at Wolfram and supporting so many different designers somewhat by necessity, but also by slight preference, I would rather just personally help a designer understand the flow of the design challenge and user need clearly enough for them to make the right word choice than for me to write it for them.

Scott:
It is a lot of … What I tend to do, and this is a little abstract I realize, but very often we get at the time someone is stuck on the words, they’ve gotten down to a very deep level and they’re not even looking at the whole screen sometimes. They’re staring at the button and like, “What do I make the buttons say?” A lot of times, all I really need to do as a coach or a guide in that situation is to just ask what are seemingly very obvious questions about like, what’s around the button?

Scott:
Is someone going to confuse this with, it looks like there’s another link up here? This link does something different than the button does. Let’s have that. Let’s hold that in our heads. Maybe write that down and then think about how is the button different than what the link does. Well, it’s different in this way. Okay. Well, we probably need to get one of those … What you just said to me, we probably want to get one of those words onto the button because that’s going to be really important for people to understand the difference between these two things.

Scott:
Now, where does the button go? Well, the button takes them here. Okay. You ask somebody to explain where the button goes. It’s like, okay, well we probably want to get one of those words in there, so that they understand where it’s going. We need the word that helps us understand that it’s different from this. We need the word that helps them understand where it’s going. Now, if you’ve got those two words, what should it say? What do you think it should say?

Scott:
At that point it usually writes itself. That componentized approach to writing to me doesn’t feel a lot like writing. That’s not how I write my blog post. That’s not how I write in my diary. That is deriving the answer from the context and the framework of the thing you’re designing. Depending on what kind of problem they’re stuck on, I might pull them all the way up to like, what kind of product is this and how is it different from other products that are like it? If we’re up at the marketing or conceptual level.

Scott:
Yeah, so sometimes it’s facilitation in just one on one. Sometimes it’s doing that as a workshop. I’ll make diagrams or ecosystem maps, which you and I talked about previously offline, like helping people visualize the world that their content and their app lives in and just really whatever it takes to get the job done.

Larry:
I guess I almost want to take you to task a little bit because what you just described is a really good practice to do. You were like, “Well, this isn’t so much about best practices as it is about collaboration,” but you just outlined a really good approach, I think, to problem solving a word situation.

Scott:
Yeah. Well, what I find in the literature such as it is of blog posts on Medium about UX writing right now, is a lot of things that people describe as best practices are really more like potential principles you could adopt to guide some of your word choices, but they’re not as rooted in practice.

Scott:
I think that’s where our discipline has a lot of growing to do is articulating the best practices from a process perspective of the best practice of being a UX writer, not the “best practice” of using this kind of tone in this kind of situation or always being … Everyone’s like, “Oh, you always have to be concise.” Well, you don’t always have to be concise. Most of the time you should be concise. Sometimes you want to be incredibly verbose and that’s a choice that you should make contextually. If the best practice is choose words contextually, then that’s when I’ll co-sign.

Larry:
Yep. No, and I love the way you said it because I think that’s like … I’m old. I go back to that era when Strunk and White was God and the Chicago Style Manual, you just did what they said. I think we’re in an era where that’s just not productive and it doesn’t help anybody to be prescriptive and a grammar nerd about stuff. Anyhow, that’s an aside. But I think it gets to that point of like, it’s more about collaboration, doing what the team needs to do and if your language … You can’t come in as the writer with this prescribed way of doing things. It’s more like an approach that you’re describing than a practice maybe.

Scott:
Yeah. It’s interesting that you invoke Strunk and White. It’s hard to do it that way anymore. My experience, content strategist, if you’re legitimately doing it the way that you and I understand content strategy, that’s not a junior level job, which means that, I’ll politely phrase it to say, most content strategists are not very young people.

Scott:
I think that the instinct there is often to like, “Well, what I need to do is take all of these grammar rules that I know, but other people don’t know and I’m going to customize them for our digital environment.” Then you get voice and tone guidelines and you get style guides and you get this production of more rules. No one likes that. That’s not a fun way to work is to feel like you’re being given rules. The best iterations of style guides and help that a content strategist can provide, I think is more in the form of a tool.

Scott:
Right? If you give somebody a rule, you can give them a tool. If you give them a tool, to me is anything that helps people think or work through a problem. Meeting agendas, worksheets, tips, checklists, any of that kind of stuff. Because you can’t just give people a bunch of rules and expect that they’re suddenly going to know how to write because if that was the case, they would already be good writers because that’s how they try to teach us writing in school. That clearly didn’t stick the first time, so I don’t think it’s going to stick the second time.

Larry:
Right. We can’t go back upstream and fix college curriculum.

Scott:
No.

Larry:
No. Hey Scott, we’re coming up on time I noticed. These always go so quickly.

Larry:
I always like to make sure if there’s anything last, anything that has come up in the conversation that you want to follow up on or just that’s on your mind about content strategy or UX writing in general. Anything last you want to share with the folks?

Scott:
Yeah. I would just love to encourage anyone out there, if you love words and you love writing and you want to be part of a design process or you already are part of a design process and you’re feeling that fear or that concern that Larry evoked that maybe you’re not valued or your work isn’t valuable. I know it’s hard to articulate it sometimes, but the fact that it’s hard to articulate doesn’t mean that you’re not valuable.

Scott:
You are a good designer. You do not have to be an expert at operating Figma or Axure or InDesign or XD to be a good designer. I would encourage you to think about the biggest level of design, which is just conceiving of the product and inventing these worlds that our products and teams operate in. A lot of the folks coming up with that kind of stuff, they’re not interaction designers. They are big picture thinkers and their [inaudible 00:29:19] people like you. I’m not really a pep talk guy, but that was my version of it. I believe in you. You can do good design. That’s the message I’d like to leave people with.

Larry:
That’s great. I love that. I think we’re all making baby steps towards that, thinking of ourselves differently than not just the writer, but we’re a designer who happens to work with words in this case and there you go. Hey, one last thing Scott, what’s the best place for people to stay in touch? Follow you on social media or connect?

Scott:
Yeah, especially in this lockdown living world that we’re in, I’m online all the time. You can reach me anywhere. It’s all centralized on my website, which is Kubie, K-U-B-I-E.co. Kubie.co. It’s not dot com. I don’t have the dot com. Missed that boat. But if you go to Kubie.co, that’s got LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people there. Twitter is always a great place and newsletters and such that folks can sign up for.

Larry:
Great. Oh, that’s right. Because I do want to make sure, because you do a UX writing events newsletter. Do you do other stuff like that? It’s all on your website, but I just want to make sure people know about it.

Scott:
Yeah. I’ve got a couple of projects in the works. I have just a very personal newsletter. It’s not about content that I send. I aim to send it monthly, that doesn’t always happen, but I would love more subscribers there. If anyone out there is a content … Would think of themselves as a content manager or a content leader in their organization, we don’t need more consultants. We got communities for those folks. If you’re in-house and you’re trying to lead a content team, I’m working on a project to try and bring some of those folks together. I’d be especially interested in hearing from you.

Larry:
Oh, great. Okay, cool. Your website is the one-stop shopping.

Scott:
You got it.

Larry:
Well, thanks so much Scott. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Scott:
Absolutely Larry. This was really fun. I appreciate you doing this. I think 70 plus episodes of anything is impressive, let alone keeping the fire going about content and UX writing and all the rest. We all really appreciate it.

Larry:
Thanks. You bet.