Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts: Writing Is Designing – Episode 58

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Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are on a mission to empower word people. Specifically the people who craft words as part of product design teams.

Their new book, Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience, shows UX content creators how to apply design principles to their writing craft.

We talked about:

• their backgrounds at Facebook, Adobe, and Allstate
• how their collaborations on workshops at Confab and other conferences led to their book
• the book’s origins as a voice-and-tone project and its quick evolution to a comprehensive UX writing book
• their mission to to empower content people no matter where they come from to become accomplished UX writers
• the importance of going beyond UX writing tasks to a broader interest in the user experience
• the importance of having an owner of the content in any product or project
• companies’ tendency to underestimate the need for UX writing talent
• the challenges of creating a smooth, consistent user experience when so many people are contributing writing to digital products
• the need to be more intentional about the words in products, to not think of them as inconsequential things that anyone can write
• how to work with teams by building relationships and contributing along with everyone else
• the importance of seeing problems that arise as teaching moments, not errors to be fixed or an opportunity for rules to be applied
• the use of words as design material
• how pushing to integrate writers as early and as deeply as possible in design projects is a worthy struggle
• how writers can contribute to design teams, but also how hard it is for writers who are new to the design world to feel like they can jump in
• how older companies with legacy staffing issues may have more trouble adopting new practices like integrating writers in their design teams than newer startups
• how writing can be practiced by anyone on a design team, not necessarily a dedicated writer
• how writing is an important skill for any designer to develop
• the importance of integrating writing into the design process, not treating it as an add-on
• the benefits of valuing writing skills as much as visual design skills when hiring UX designers
• how UX writing is a distinct type of writing, different from business correspondence
• how the current role of the UX writer, while challenging, is uniquely rewarding
• the importance of highlighting the differences between writing interface copy and other types of copy (marketing, advertising, technical, etc.)

Andy’s Bio

When Andy was eight, he wanted to be a poet and a paleontologist. Twenty-seven years later, he is neither, but he uses those skills in his day job as a content strategist on Adobe’s product design team — writing under huge constraints, and uncovering artifacts from big, old software interfaces. When he’s not working, he’s creating podcasts and zines about one of his favorite topics: wooden pencils. Find him in San Francisco with his wife and two large cats, or online at andy.wtf.

Michael’s Bio

Michael J. Metts helps teams build great products and services by putting people first. With a background in journalism, he frequently finds himself talking about the role words play in designing useful, usable experiences. He has given talks and taught workshops on the topic at industry conferences around the world. He lives with his wife, two children, and a very small dog just outside Chicago.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

We are finally coming to a point in the evolution of product design where writing skills are appreciated right alongside research and visual design skills. Andy Welfle and Michael Metts are on a mission to accelerate this evolution. Their new book – Writing Is Designing – gives writers and product managers tools that will help them integrate writing into user-focused design projects. Nowadays, in the most successful products, writing is no longer a late-stage add-on; it’s now an integral part of the design process.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 58 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us, Andy Welfle and Michael Metts. They’re the coauthors of Writing is Designing, a new book coming out from Rosenfeld Media. I’d like each of you to tell the folks just a little bit more about yourself. Andy, yeah, you’re first in my screen, so tell the folks a little bit-

Andy:
I am a content strategist. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I moved out here about five years ago and worked for a little while on the very large Facebook content strategy team. About almost three years ago, I left to go start a practice at Adobe Design, centralized Adobe product design team. I’ll let Michael kind of get into it a little bit more, but he and I met and started doing some workshops about this very topic at Confab.

Larry:
All right. Michael?

Michael:
Yeah, so I initially set out to be a journalist. Didn’t see myself in UX at all, but made that transition. It seemed like a really good fit pretty early in my career. In a sense, I’ve worked in a lot of different environments from a software company to an agency. I’m now leading a conversation design team that works on AI products for a large insurance company, Allstate. A lot of different experience, but along the way met Andy and we began to become aware that this area was increasingly in focus for a lot of companies and a lot of practitioners. We just been teaching on the topic for a while and I’m really excited to have the book come out soon.

Larry:
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing it. The table of contents looks really interesting. How many of you … The book arose from these workshops that you’ve done at Confab and other conferences, right?

Michael:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yep. Tell me a little bit about those. I assume this is sort of the wrap up of the gleanings you’ve made in that workshop. Were there any kind of surprises as you went along the way? This is such a new field and every day … Every conversation I have, I learn something new and get some new insight and some clarity about the practice of it. Can you tell me a little bit about your process and how the insights that led to the book kind of unfolded?

Andy:
Yeah, it started very much as … The workshop started as like a voice and tone workshop, right? We talked about how to establish a product or a interface voice and how to use tone in strategic ways kind of throughout. I think both of us had had thoughts around that that were something we really wanted to share but we … We started off doing half day workshops at Confab intensive and then Confab eventually and then at some point we realized that this was only two … Voice and tone were only two small pieces of this much larger whole.

Andy:
We just got a lot of feedback and we realized that we needed to talk about writing for clarity and we needed to talk about collaboration and then critique and sharing and of course testing and researching. It actually really helped. We went to Singapore to do a two full day workshop during Singapore Design Week and that was actually really useful because it let us kind of test out our book format with the group of people in workshop form and really kind of showed us along the way where we needed to kind of expand and where we didn’t need to go into a bunch of detail.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Michael, did you have any thing you want to add to that or …

Michael:
Yeah, I mean I think it was … Like Andy said, it started as voice and tone and I think those are topics that people were really interested in at the time because we were connected with the content strategy community and often that’s how a content strategists might contribute. They might be developing strategic direction for a team, but I think what’s been interesting is that we’ve noticed, and this has happened in our own careers as well, there’s a lot more tactical work that needs to be done and a lot of ways to think about that work that are important, that the industry needs to be talking about more and more.

Michael:
I think we’ve even seen the programming at conferences concept shift over time to be a lot more encompassing of actually what it means to write a good error message for example or how do you figure out what to put on that button in the first place. There’s so much to be written in a digital product experience and so that’s really where the need for this book kind of arose is that there are a lot of people being hired to do this work now more than ever and we just wanted to provide some ways for people to think about it.

Larry:
That kind of gets to … As I understand it, your mission in doing the book is to empower content people no matter where they come from because it is growing so quickly that you might be a graphic designer or a programmer or come from any number of fields and be tasked with this kind of writing. In your work with this, have you found all those people you’re hoping to reach in your workshops and stuff or are you constantly discovering new folks who are all of a sudden UX writers.

Michael:
Yeah, I mean it’s-

Andy:
We found them all. We found them all.

Larry:
Every single one of them. No stone unturned.

Andy:
Sorry man, keep going.

Michael:
Well, I mean what you bring up is really neat and really a cool part of this is that we always meet new people with backgrounds that are different from anything we’ve heard of or experienced in our own careers throughout this journey. We interviewed a lot of people for the book. That’s one of the things that I’m really excited about is that it’s not just our voices, but other practitioners in the industry with different backgrounds and ways of working.

Michael:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty big element to this. Now I mean, I think that, as you identified, there’s all kinds of people who could be doing writing, whether it’s like a product manager or developer, designer. It’s another thing to really be passionate about doing the writing. I hope too that if any of those people happen to pick up our book, because it’s a passing interest, we start to help them see what’s involved in it and how exciting it can be and how there’s really a lot of depth that goes into this type of work. It’s not just simply writing a label or an error message. It goes far deeper than that. There’s a lot to learn about your users and about how they’re experiencing your products and that kind of thing.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andy. Andy, did you have anything to add to that or …

Andy:
No, I think Michael covered it. Yeah, lots of people who are responsible for words and just don’t have the words to talk about it. Right? This is kind of giving them the rhetoric and the pieces to think about as they’re writing.

Larry:
Yeah, no, it’s … Michael, what you just said about like it’s way easier to get a journalist excited about words than is to get a JavaScript programmer excited about it. In fact, last night I was riding home from an event with a friend who’s a front end-coder at Microsoft, works on the Outlook app for iOS or some really specific thing. I said … I had just done an interview. My last interview was with Kylie Hansen who heads a huge UX team that has embedded content designers all over the place. I kind of assumed that that might be the case there, but he said no. He writes the copy, this programmer dude.

Larry:
Is that … How common are you finding … You’ve probably got a pretty good feel at this point for who’s doing this kind of writing. What percentage of it is word people and what percentage is like design people and what percentage would be like developer kind of folks?

Andy:
I think that varies widely depending on on the company. At Adobe, there’s … Depending on whatever product silo it is that you’re talking about, it could be some marketing people who are generally thinking about words, but generally have kind of a persuasion kind of value driven writing. Sometimes … I’ve gotten really good at telling when a product manager or an engineer has written a copy or when a designer has written copy that I’m going in to try to fix or checkout.

Andy:
Yeah, the trouble is I think it’s when nobody really owns it that you can get just this wildly inconsistent copy and that doesn’t necessarily have to be a dedicated UX writer. I would love it to be, especially in our case, but yeah. I think as long as there’s some strategy and some discipline kind of behind that writing, it could be from anyone. It could be from any of those folks.

Larry:
I think from a practical perspective in the near term, it’s likely to be almost anyone, right? Because it’s such a fast growing discipline and so many needs for it and so few people who actually are doing it now and trained in it.

Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of companies tend to underestimate the need and I think that that’s something that will probably just happen organically as this continues to grow and people make the case for increasing head count and bringing their teams up and all that. We’ll start to see more of how this type of work is helping enable teams, but to me, it’s interesting to think of too, some of the reasons something might be written.

Michael:
You might need to write something because you can’t ship your code unless you write it. That reason is going to be really different versus if you’re trying to accomplish something strategic in the user’s journey, right?

Michael:
That’s really interesting. Some of this stuff just happens by accident and even the teams where writers are on them, may not have a sense of everything that’s being written all the time because these systems are so complex and there are so many moving pieces and parts. Maybe someone will reach out to the legal team for a policy about a certain feature and that’ll just be put in to the interface and you may not know about it until later.

Michael:
I think understanding that words are things that people use and interact with is pretty key for any team. That’s something that I think UX writers and content strategists bring to these organizations. They help people see this isn’t just something you’re putting in, this is something people interact with. It affects key business metrics like adoption and onboarding. It affects whether people are able to use the system at all. To me it’s exciting because UX writers don’t just do the writing, but they help teams see how critical words are and the success of the products they’re working on.

Larry:
Now you’ve both had success at this because a lot of what you just talked about, Michael, is you have to persuade people that this is important and we should be more embedded in this and even have proactive managers that are reminding us of the purpose and vision of this, not just the deadline that’s being met. Can you tell me a little bit about how you manage your writing design stuff in your practices?

Michael:
Well, I mean I wouldn’t want to paint the picture that it’s all sunshine and roses in whatever environment I’ve been in. Even the other day, I found out about some really important messaging that was supposed to be a part of a chat bot we were releasing that just wasn’t there for some reason. A team had decided to turn it off without telling anyone and it was pretty critical to the usability. We had to just sort of scramble to put that back into place.

Michael:
There are all sorts of things that happen all the time and people tend to think of word like they’re so innocent. You don’t need Sketch, you don’t need Figma to write, you just need your word processor. People tend to think of words as a really simple inconsequential thing that really anyone can and should be working on. I think what we’re hoping is that people start to treat it with more intentionality.

Larry:
Well, I’m just wondering if there are lessons in that specific episode you just mentioned, Michael. That you had to convince … Oh my goodness, there’s been a mistake here. We have to get that back. How did you approach that? What was the …

Michael:
Well, that’s one of the things we talk about in the book. Chapter eight is all about how to work with your teams and I found the best way to do it is just by building strong relationships and contributing. Some of the best teams out there, in this space, are making sure that the writers they hire are embedded in a team and dedicated to that team’s business problems and really working through it with them. You don’t … It’s hard for it to happen by coming in and saying like, “Oh, you’re doing this wrong,” or, “Here are the regulations from on high that you need to follow.”

Michael:
For me, the best success has been to join a team, usually working in some sort of scrum model and be a part of what they’re doing, be a part of the work and dedicate yourself to figuring out the problems with them. Then organically it comes to a place where they start to look to you when they encounter a problem that involves language and they start to understand that you’re a really valuable resource that can help the product become more successful.

Larry:
Yeah. I think in that sense, you’re a microcosm of the whole discipline. Right now … Each one of us has been tasked with that. Andy, how about you? Do you have any good stories about how you’ve managed to persuade people to be more attentive to words?

Andy:
Yeah, I think similar to Michael when I started at Adobe, I was the only UX writer, just among 300 designers. I was trying to sort of find one area where I could go really deep and find another area where I could go really wide. I did start office hours, just allowing people to book half an hour with me, which just from anywhere across the company, but that didn’t do much to actually solve problems, but what it did do was allow me to just meet these people and establish a relationship and understand the problem space and give people really broad ideas on how to approach the writing and approach the word problems, but I did also find a product team. It was the the admin council team. If your business has a large Creative Cloud account with 30,000 people in it, this is the interface that you use to distribute licenses and access to people.

Andy:
That was a really interesting team because it’s very in depth and very configurable. There’s a lot of words there and it traditionally had a lot of very bad words there. What I tried to do is just go in and as I was writing text strings, I was also trying to turn that into little frameworks and just really simple things like, “Hey, here’s the difference between the word “add” in a button and the word “create” in a button.” Because those are different words, but sometimes people can use them kind of interchangeably.

Andy:
I basically just tried to create a little one-pager about each of these things as I went along and distributed them and they still have life. That was two and a half years ago and I’ve kind of moved on to management functions, but I think just kind of taking everything as like a teaching moment just to really scale out is really important.

Larry:
Yeah, I think … That’s a common theme because again, everything’s so new. Somebody’s got to educate folks about this. I’m wondering … This is all there. We’re kind of getting already off into management stuff, but I’m really curious too about the practice of this. How you use writing and language as a design element and tool. Have your – sort of experiences with this evolved over the last five years? Tell me, because it seems like, I don’t know that anybody was using that kind of language five years ago and here you are and it just makes perfect sense talking about it that way.

Andy:
Yeah, I think writing … The kind of tagline that just everybody uses that really clicks for people is that this is designing with words and Nicole Fenton had a really great blog post from 2013, Michael? She talks about words as design material and that’s really instrumental to the way that we think about it and as we sit on design teams and talk to designers, that’s really, I think, instrumental to approach writing. This isn’t … We’re not writing kind of like long form linear narratives that kind of come in, can be fit into a box. We’re writing … We’re defining what the box is in the first place, right? We’re writing in a very iterative way, very, very specifically and collaboratively.

Andy:
That’s really clicked for me and it kind of helped me explain how we’re doing it among a bunch of designers, but for sure … I think until … I can’t imagine a future where we’re going to just sort of be right there at the beginning, iterating along with designers from the start. It’s very … It’s kind of our ideal, right? We have the idea of a copywriter coming into the end, so deeply ingrained in kind of the psyche of a creative experience that it’s really kind of a struggle to get there, but it’s a good one and I think if you can turn it into sort of an educational moment. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun.

Larry:
Well, there are a few success stories of people who’ve managed to go upstream and get embedded from the start. I think Jonathan Colman … I don’t know if he took that job at Intercom because they operate that way or if they hired him to do that, but anyhow, they are integrated from the get-go and similarly, Kylie Hansen at Microsoft on their Azure team and the AI team there. They have content designers embedded right alongside the data analytics and UI people, interaction designers, researchers and everybody right from the start.

Larry:
There’s a few success stories out there, but I guess let me ask each of you what your … What do you guess the percentage of places are that have content integrated from the get go.

Andy:
Twelve. [laughter]

Michael:
That’s a tough one. I mean, because I think it’s always going to be about making choices about how your team is used. To me, even if I worked in a … Well, I mean I could speak to this, a big organization like Allstate where I’m a part of, you have people embedded in critical work in the other work you may have some advisory capacity for, but you’re always going to … There’s just … There’s been pretty common knowledge with books out there like Sense and Respond that members of the design team really should be embedded with the rest of the team and exploring these problems together.

Michael:
The aha moment, for me, is just realizing that if you’re a writer you are also contributing to the team. You’re also a designer. That is a pretty key moment. It’s hard, I think, for writers, especially those who are new to the field, to start to think of their work as design, which is part of what we hope people come away from the book with a sense that there’s a lot more to it than just writing the words.

Michael:
I mean when it gets into the practice, you’re doing a lot more things like research or doing things like testing. You’re involved in understanding what your users are going through and it’s really hard to be successful unless you do that. I think even companies that have a small team are trying to work that way because they understand that that’s how the most success happens, by being embedded in a team and focusing on those problems. I think some companies, it takes time to get there as they grow their practice, as they grow in maturity, but that’s just part of it as the new discipline comes to the fore.

Larry:
Yeah.

Andy:
I think size and yeah, age of the company depends a lot on … Just kind of how forward the UX practice is that a company makes a huge difference as far as if writing is kind of treated like designing. Jonathan, for example, his company is eight years old and I think he said he has like 25 or 30 people on the design team, which is amazing and he’s had really great strides there.

Andy:
Adobe is a 36 year old company and there’s 300 people on the design team before we even started with any sort of content strategy practice. It’s going to take a little bit longer of a time to catch up and to really integrate ourselves into it.

Larry:
Yep. No, it occurs to me as both of you talked that that’s really a two-level issue here that … First of all, just getting UX integrated into engineering and product design teams is hard enough. Then getting content embedded into those UX teams is like the next step.

Michael:
Yeah. That’s … Honestly, I feel like there doesn’t always have to be that distinction. I’ve been working as a … In terms of job title, I’ve been a designer for the past five or six years now, but writing has always been my focus in how I practice design. I would love to see more companies experiment with hiring product designers that have writing as a core skill set. I don’t think you necessarily have to tie this to a specific job title, like UX writer, content designer, any of those. I think it’s a really important design skill and it should be treated as part of the design team regardless of how you structure it, how you set up your roles, the titles and everything like that.

Michael:
To me, it’s really critical that design teams view it that way, that person with writing as their core skillset is also practicing design right along with them because if not, if that person’s viewed … I was talking about this the other day, if that person is viewed as being there to serve the designer’s needs, to write whatever the designer needs them to write, then that person’s going to be disillusioned and they’re not going to be as effective in the work they’re doing. It’s really critical that teams figure out how to make this part of how they design a product and not build it on as like an add on to their design function.

Larry:
Yeah. You reminded me, I saw … I can’t remember who the presenter was, but six or eight years ago I saw a presentation about the T-shaped UX designer. That everybody should have the basic knowledge of research, UI design, interaction design and all that and content strategy and all those things, but everybody should also have a deep specialty come to the vertical line of that T. It also reminds me of this, that a lot of what you’re talking about is roles. That the same … All these roles have to unfold in any one project and the individual person assigned to them, that can just be almost scatter-gun depending on the team you’ve assembled. Is that meshed with your experience?

Michael:
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I wish more companies would just be a little more flexible with that. There’s usually a huge focus, when you’re hiring product designers, around visual design skills. What would it look like if you hired some specifically for visual design and some specifically for writing? I think you could really benefit from that.

Larry:
Yeah.

Andy:
I think also … At Confab last year, Erika Hall and I were just talking and joking about how one reason why writers are often undervalued is we don’t have a complicated tool that nobody else can use. We don’t have a Sketch or an XD or a Photoshop or whatever. Maybe that’s the next tool we should build at Adobe, just some sort of a writing tool that nobody else … You have to get training to know how to use.

Andy:
I definitely think that it stems from the idea that writing is something that comes after or everybody can write, but writing an email and writing a slide deck and writing interface language is all the same discipline. That’s not true. I think we all here know that, but a lot of people don’t.

Andy:
Once we can get people to see that writers have a trade, writers have a craft … It’s something that designers should know how to do too, but if … It’s definitely one of those T-shaped skills. Writing is just not part of that T. It’s just not considered-

Larry:
You’re right, because everybody has a word processor or a text editor and you need to … Andy and Michael’s Magical Mystical Writing Machine or something that-

Andy:
Yeah.

Larry:
This proprietary software, pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah, exactly.

Andy:
Explore that vertical.

Michael:
Yeah, but I mean honestly if you think about having worked as a designer, designers kind have a tendency to use the tool as a gate keeping mechanism. Just keep people away from the work. This is my work. I’m the designer – me. You all look to me and my incredible work over here. Writers are, out of the gate, at a disadvantage because they don’t have a gate keeping mechanism. They have to sort of win by the merit of gaining buy-in, building relationships, the merit of their ideas, solving problems for users. To me, that is a little bit more … It’s challenging, but it’s also more exciting because you start to see where the real change happens in the user’s life. The merit is not just that you have created a deliverable, but you can point to why you did it and why it was important, why it was critical for the user.

Larry:
Yeah. Nice. Hey you guys, I noticed … This always goes so fast. We’re coming up close to time. I always like to leave some room at the end. Is there anything last or anything that’s on your mind, anything we haven’t talked about yet that about writing is designing or anything that just hasn’t come up that you’d like to make sure we get in before we wrap up?

Andy:
I don’t know. What do you think Michael?

Michael:
Well, I mean I just … I’m excited that there’s so much energy around this topic and as you said … Andy was saying, it’s a craft and I have no problem with anyone learning how to do that craft, but I think it’s important to start to highlight what goes into it and to start to develop some language around what makes writing for an interface or writing for a digital product different from writing marketing copy and advertising or even technical communication, things like that. Not just …

Michael:
I think it’s really important as we do that, that it’s not about the roles, it’s not about the job titles, it’s not about defining and being really introspective, but about how we can help teams and really be a resource to them as people who work with words as a primary skill set. To me, that’s what’s cool about this. That’s what’s exciting, but I think there’s sort of a danger that we fall into just looking at our own job titles and descriptions so much that we don’t see the bigger problems we’re all trying to solve.

Larry:
Yeah. From what you’ve said, Michael, almost everything you’ve said to this point, I think if you focus on the relationship-building part of it and then let the titles and the exact scope and everything unfold as you’re helping people solve problems. Andy, you got anything last?

Andy:
Not a lot. It was a complete pleasure to write a book with Michael. We are sort of like – our creative processes and styles are different enough that they’re very complimentary to each other. I tend to just be very scattered and write a little bit here and write a little bit there and over here and over here and Michael is very steadying and can kind of pull everything together. This book was a lot of fun to do and I’m glad to be able to think about other things next year.

Larry:
Yeah. Everybody comes to this field from a different place. I started in book publishing, I was a book editor for many years. I have midwifed many a book and I know that release that you’ll feel as your hand a manuscript to the publisher and go, “Give my baby to the world.”

Andy:
Where did the quote come from, “I hate writing. I love having written.” Was that like Gertrude Stein or somebody like that?

Larry:
No, I’ve heard that quote, but I can’t recall the source.

Andy:
It’s so true.

Larry:
Congratulations on having written to both of you.

Andy:
Thank you.

Michael:
Thanks so much.

Larry:
Yeah. Well thanks so much for coming on the show too. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Michael:
Likewise. Thanks for having us.

Larry:
Thanks.