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Yael Ben-DavidUX writers and other design professionals are famously, and correctly, user-centered.
Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers can sometimes benefit from slight course corrections to better account for the business side of our work.
Her new book, “The Business of UX Writing,” makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs.
We talked about:
- the origin story behind her new book, “The Business of UX Writing”
- the lack of clear pathways into the UX writing field
- how her background in neurobiology helped make her equally interested in quantitative and qualitative measurements
- the need for UX writers to course-correct on how we balance user concerns and business goals
- examples of how to balance user needs and business goals
- how to think about and measure the ROI (return on investment) of UX writing
- her KAPOW framework for measuring content ROI
- the importance of listening in stakeholder interactions and in speaking their language
- the importance of the O in KAPOW – owning your metrics – which you can do even if you’re not good at math
- the correct answer to your “Who am I to write a book?” question: “Who are you NOT to write a book”
Yael’s bio
Yael is a UX writer who specializes in complex products. She has written health, financial, and other products used by more than 100 million people around the world. After a BA in journalism at New York University and MSc and PhD in neurobiology at The Hebrew University, Yael discovered her passion for making innovative tech accessible to mass markets through clear, helpful, data-driven microcopy. She also bakes outrageous birthday cakes.
Connect with Yael online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 130. Content strategy is fundamentally about balancing your users’ needs with your organization’s business goals. UX design is a famously user-centered profession. Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers and other design professionals sometimes need to course-correct to better account for the business side of our work. Her new book, “The Business of UX Writing,” makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs.
Interview transcript
Larry:
All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 130 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Yael Ben-David. Yael is a really well-known UX writer. If you’re in the field at all, you’ve probably come across here at a conference or in the conversation somewhere online. But I’m really excited to have her on today because we’re scheduling this podcast so that this episode should drop the day her new book comes out, and her book is called The Business of UX Writing. So, welcome, Yael. Tell the folks a little bit more about the book and how it came to be.
Yael:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to, right at launch, be sharing this episode. The book is, like you said, called The Business of UX Writing, and it basically became about because I started talking a while back and thinking about the ROI, the return on investment of UX writing. So, really, what is the impact on the business and not just on the user? The more I thought about it and wrote about it and spoke about it, the more I realized I had to say and was getting asked questions about it and was actually one of the first people in the field I think really make noise about it, and eventually, it shaped up into a book, which I… Since then, many more have fallen down this rabbit hole with me, and there are more talks about it, which is fantastic. I don’t find it repetitive at all. I think anyone working in this field and using a data-centered approach is going to have contributions to make and the more voices, the better. So, I’m really glad though that the A Book Apart is publishing this and that it’s joining the ranks of a more mainstream niche within the field.
Larry:
I love that, and when you just mentioned the data-centricness of it, and one of the things, it’s pretty late in the book, I forget when you mentioned it, but to me, it was kind like, “Oh man, I wish I’d known this sooner,” but you were a neurobiologist or what was your field again for 10 years?
Yael:
Yeah, so I was a neurobiologist for 10 years, and I think that a lot of the ways we approach research in neurobiology have informed my UX writing practice, believe it or not. I love that about UX writers. I love that they come from every walk of life, and part of that is because there is no clear path to UX writing. Not yet anyway. I just started actually teaching a college course in UX writing at the university, and that to me was very much one small step for Yael Ben-David and one giant leap for the discipline, that it’s finally making its way into mainstream academia. But in large part, there’s no clear way in like a lawyer goes to law school, which means that people are coming in from all over, and I think that just benefits the product, and as excited as I am that it’s becoming a recognized field and it is joining mainstream education, it’s also concerns me because I want to make sure that we don’t get people in who haven’t had, or don’t get only people in, who haven’t had other experiences that they can bring and other perspectives, but I digress. We were talking about oh-
Larry:
Yeah, but I think part of my intent in asking that about that is that most, like you said, the lack of a clear path in. I think it’s safe to say most UX writers and content designers come from some kind of writing background like journalism, copywriting, something like that, and they’re media-savvy and data sensitive, I think, but you were data immersed in here in a scientific field for a while. Do you think that’s part of where you have become so interested in the quantification of our work?
Yael:
Yes, and this might surprise people from outside the sciences, but I feel equally as strongly about quantitative and qualitative measurements because of my neurobiology practice, and it’s not all just about numbers because the numbers, statistics can be misinterpreted regardless of how hard you think the hard science is. It’s the same in UX writing whether you’re talking about click-through rates or open rates or whatever it is, or whether in biology, you’re talking about anything that you’re measuring, the quantitative data on its own. It just doesn’t tell the story. It tells the what, but not the why, and without looking at the bigger picture and using mixed methods and really having a robust perspective in both fields, you can’t glean anything meaningful from the data. So, it might not be intuitive, but yeah, in neuroscience, I also really experienced that needing a bigger picture, not being able to look at a certain experiment or a certain paper in isolation, and I definitely bring a lot of that. Actually, A Book Apart, one of the editors, kept catching sort of sciencey phrases and having me take them out. So, sometimes, the lines in the careers blur, but I think they caught them all.
Larry:
No, but I think it was a really nifty surprise to me that it came up so late in the book because I never would’ve guessed that, but in retrospect, all of the… and I love that it’s not just quantitative, that it’s qualitative. It’s a balanced mixed methods of… When you talk, I think was it chapter four, when you talk about measurement and showing results that you survey all the different ways you can measure stuff and it’s a really good blend of qualitative and quantitative things.
Larry:
Hey, but I want to make sure, because I feel like I’m burying the lead here as we say in journalism. The thing that just grabbed me the most about this book is you have make a pretty strong call to action – to use lingo from our profession – that basically there was this one passage in the book where you say that we need to do some course correcting about the all-encompassing user centeredness of UX writing, and it gets back to this data-driven approach that that hints at the business side of things, which is what the book is all about, and balancing that with the human-centered design part of it. Can you talk a little bit about that how you came to focus on that?
Yael:
Yeah, sure. Definitely. I think that somewhere along the line, the idea that the business and the user are partners and should be collaborators towards shared goals got lost, and I understand why. I don’t think anyone’s to blame. I think we got extreme because we had to. So, let me back up, and basically the first chapter, a short biography of UX writing walks through the history of how I think we got to where we are today, and basically, for a long time, there was no consideration of the user. Software was being put out that just users had to speak computer. Computer didn’t speak human and too bad. That’s just the way it is. So, when user experience started to become a discipline, even before it had a name, all of us in that field were working to represent the user, to advocate for the user, and it was really, really needed, and we had to be almost aggressive because nobody else was doing it, and we had to empower them when they had to be represented.
Yael:
So, we went all out and that’s fine and that’s great and that’s what was needed at the time, but the whole movement was very reactionary. It was very like here’s wrong. Here’s what we need to fix, and it was a very like early… I almost think of it as back when as a discipline, we were toddlers throwing tantrums, and that was behaviorally expected for where we were in our development, but I believe we’ve matured past that and we’ve advocated for the users, and I think where I got inspired to write the book was within my own work when I felt like some of the conversations I was participating in or overhearing really made it sound like we had to make decisions that were going to cost one or the other.
Yael:
So, if we go with the better experience, it’s going to be bad for business. It’s going to cost more development resources or take more time or whatever it is, and if we do the thing that’s better for the business, which is going to be more profitable or better for brand recognition or whatever it is, then it has to therefore inherently be a worse user experience, and that just didn’t strike me – that can’t be – because at the end of the day, we’re partners. If the business doesn’t have users, there’s no business. It falls flat on his face, right? It goes bankrupt. But if the user doesn’t have the business, they can’t do the job that they came there to get done. So, at Fundbox, for example, I was working on an app that gave access to credit to small businesses. If there were no users, we’d have no one to give credit to. There’s no more business.
Yael:
But if the users didn’t have Fundbox, then they’d have no one to take the money from. So, it wasn’t in their best interest for us to, let’s say, waste money “improving,” and I’ll tell you why I use quotes in a second, but let’s say we want to improve the experience by personalizing emails, by using the user’s name, and not just saying, “Hey there.” Okay, so you could argue that that’s a better experience. It feels more personal. Fine. Let’s say I then find out that that’s going to take… because I now have to query the backend and maintain a database with the names, and then I need some CSS around what if the user inputs the name in all lower case letters, for example, how do I make sure it comes out correctly in the email so we don’t look foolish? And what happens when the query fails and it doesn’t return anything and we need a catch-all, right? We need a backup plan for those situations.
Yael:
All of this costs the company, and you know what? At the end of the day, like really, was it worth it? Because what if I could have taken all of those resources and instead of personalizing an email salutation, built a whole new feature? Now, I’m being dramatic on purpose, but do you really think it would be in the user’s best interest for us to call them by their name as opposed to roll out a feature that they’ve been requesting for six months? So, I guess I got inspired to write about this partnership when I realized that… I understand where the kind of tension came from and where this sort of attitude subconsciously bubbled up of, “It’s us or them. It can’t be both. If we’re advocating for the user, then it’s going to be bad for the business,” and et cetera, but I just think that we’re not toddlers anymore and we are at a place where we’re a little older. We have some more self-control.
Yael:
We have more ability to do introspection and look backwards and look forwards and make more deliberate decisions about where we want to see our discipline go and what’s important to us now, and I think we’re at a really good place for stopping and course correcting and saying, “Okay, the pendulum swung too far.” That’s how it had to be at the time, but now we can slow down, and it’ll benefit our users even more if we can bring the business in as a partner.
Larry:
Yeah, I love the way you’re saying that. One of the things you’re reminding me of, this is like… and not to be self-absorbed about this, but when Kristina Halvorson announced the end of Confab and that they’d just be focusing on Button in the future, I was like, “Oh crap. Is content strategy going away as a thing?” I was like, “No. It just manifests in different ways,” and a lot of what you’re talking about that I think one of the fundamental things of content strategy practice is that balancing user needs and business goals. So, this totally fits into what you were just saying about the point in time that we’re at. It does feel like we’re at some kind of inflection point in the evolution of the discipline that it like this makes perfect sense and it’s also a great… So, I think while strategy has been there as a practice to help us think about this, it hasn’t been suffused into everything we do, and you’re doing that for UX writing. You’re getting the strategy into there.
Larry:
And the core of that, the main mechanism by which you measure the effectiveness of that balance is this, the concept of ROI. Have we even mentioned that yet? We’re halfway through this talk and we haven’t talked about ROI, which is kind of the whole point of the book, right?
Yael:
Yeah. So, ROI, the return on investment, right? So, basically getting more out than you put in is… That’s the core of the book, and I hope there’s a lot more going on on case studies and frameworks. I actually created a UX writing ROI framework called KAPOW. So, there’s a big section on that, on really a playbook for UX writers to take into their every day, how they can of organize their work and think about their work and to make sure that they’re really balancing all of this and prioritizing according to what’s going to benefit everyone at the end of the day as synergetically as possible, but yeah. So, part of why I think thinking about UX writing impact in terms of ROI is so important is because it’s speaking the language of business stakeholders and a lot of so much of what we do is collaborate with stakeholders, and stakeholders in a lot of cases are our users, and we need to speak their language to get the best everybody has to offer.
Yael:
So, I don’t see our job as convincing people that we’re right. It’s more about how can we work together to get the best of what everyone has to offer. So, as much as I want to be heard in my area of expertise, I want to hear from others in their areas of expertise. So, when I’m sitting with a business stakeholder or somebody from the credit team or the risk team in the case of a financial product, for example, or when I was working on a genetics product and I’m sitting with the bioinformaticians. I think that’s how you pronounce it. The bioinformatics department. So, I need to hear the language that they’re using just like I would listen to users’ language in a support call and I need to know what kind of language resonates with them if we’re going to work together to produce the best experience, which is also going to be the best outcome for the business so that the business can continue to provide the experience, et cetera, et cetera.
Yael:
So, yeah, I think speaking in numbers is a way to speak to a lot of different stakeholders who otherwise might have a hard time understanding what we’re doing. I think when people complain that we’re not invited to the table that more often than not, it’s just because it’s not understood what we do. So, it’s not a deliberate exclusion. It’s just a lack of understanding, and if we continue to use language that doesn’t resonate with the people who we’re expecting to be invited by, we can say it louder and louder and louder and nothing will change, but if we change the way we’re presenting what it is we’re trying to present in a way that resonates that we only need to say it once and we don’t need to raise our voices. So, I just felt that this was sort of a set of language and an approach that could pull in more collaborators more easily.
Larry:
That’s great. The way you just said it, all of a sudden, I’m thinking it’s like you’re localizing your language around what you do, to be honest.
Yael:
Totally. Totally.
Larry:
It’s like, “Hey, you’re a business guy. I got some numbers for you.” Okay. Yeah, I love that. One thing, as you were talking, you mentioned the KAPOW acronym. I love that. In terms of, like if you just had to take one section of this book and hand it to a UX writer to help them improve their work, if you just went through that, it’s kind of the most checklist-ey kind of thing in the book that this notion of… Wait. I’m going to read it. Know your goals, articulate the solutions, prioritize options, own your metrics, and then write. First of all, I love that writing is the last thing in there for a UX writer and they know your goals part, to what you were just saying, the other thing you do in terms of talking to, like in articulating the goals, you do a lot of homework, and it sounds like you’ll go into a meeting like inferring what the goals are from other things you’ve done and read and people you’ve talked with, and then you can kind of put them out there as either like… I don’t know.
Larry:
Tell me a little bit about it because I can picture you either going and saying like, “Hey, we’re aligned on this, right? This is the goals we’re talking about,” and get some feedback. Or you could just go in and say like, “I don’t know. I heard that maybe this is going on.” Can you talk a little bit about that, like how you do the research to establish the goals you’re aiming towards?
Yael:
Sure. So, knowing your goals is like a lot can go into that. So, like you said, part of it can be just finding existing documentation. If you have the luxury of working at a place that happens to have up-to-date documentation of goals with consensus on all levels, from the CEO down. So, that’s fabulous.
Larry:
Where is that place? That doesn’t exist. I’m sorry…
Yael:
In lieu of the dream, there are a lot of ways that you can collect goals, but the most important takeaway here. I mean, to drill into all the technical tactical… I’d say read the book, but the high level thing I want people to take away about know your goals is you’re going to get measured on achieving those goals. So, don’t just work for nothing. If you don’t know what you’re getting measured on, it’s like playing baseball and thinking that you’re going to get a point every time you, I don’t know, kick the ball. Like no. We’re not playing soccer. We’re playing baseball. You got to know the rules of the game. You got to know what counts as a point. You have to know, and otherwise, you need a north star or else what are you working now? There’s different ways you can get that, and one of the things I threw out in the book was for anyone who says, “We don’t have that documented at a company where I don’t have access to decision makers and there’s no way I can get my hands on something like this.”
Yael:
You’d be surprised what you can learn even just from a peer who’s been there a long time.
People who have historical context simply from working at the company can point you in the right direction. But the most important thing about know your goals and why that’s all the way at the beginning while I write, it’s all the way at the end, is it’s just so important when it comes to proving your success or even just succeeding in general that you know what the end game looks like. But if we’re already talking about KAPOW, and I can just take the license to pull out one that I want to talk about the most, it’s own your metrics. So, KAPOW, the O is own your metrics, and the reason I want to call that one out is I think it’s maybe the most novel to a lot of readers. It’s going to be one that they haven’t necessarily thought as much about because I think writers sometimes think that metrics are for math people, and oh yeah, that’s in the day-to-day analytics.
Yael:
And what I really wanted to bring up and drive home in own your metrics is we don’t have to do the math, but we have to take responsibility for the math getting done and we need to advocate for engineering implementing whatever backend things they need to implement so that data is collected, and we need to advocate for getting a data analyst on every product team so that we know that data that engineering has just set up collection for is getting looked at, and we need to be that person who liaises and makes it happen and just takes responsibility and owns the existence of metrics for our copy because if we don’t, nobody else will.
Yael:
So, if you start with knowing what winning looks like and then you take responsibility for keeping score or making sure that score is kept, then that’s where you’re going to start to have an impact, feel an impact, communicate your impact, show, not tell about your impact, but it really means stepping out of our comfort zone and saying, “Okay. Yes, I’m a writer. I’m not the business person or the founder who set up the goals, and I’m not the mathematician who figures out the metrics, but I have such a bigger perspective than the micro copy. I have this whole system, this whole machinery running around the micro copy that together has such a big impact if I take ownership of that,” and there’s just so much, and you don’t have to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes because I’m talking about doing things that nobody else is doing anyway. So, either we step up or it doesn’t get done. So, I think-
Larry:
I love that. I love the way you articulate that that it’s our numbers, that that’s how we track our success and how we can set ourselves up for success, it sounds like. So, that part of it, but just as sort of a self-help part of the program, maybe, like I love your background because you’re like opposite land person coming in from a data-heavy thing into UX writing. Most of us, like me, I got into journalism because I was bad at math. So, I’ve become okay with it and I’m comfortable with numbers, but I know we all have varying degrees of comfort with that. Do you have any practical tips about just how to become more quantitative in your approach to UX writing?
Yael:
Yeah, so look, I’ll tell you something. When you say I wasn’t good at math, I remember getting really annoyed one time. I did my degrees in the medical school of the university and in the med school we had some courses where we had to memorize a lot of things and I was very irritated because I said, “In this day and age, you don’t need to memorize anything. You don’t need to know anything. You need to know where to look to find it.” So, I don’t think you need to know how to do math or know how to do any of this. You need to know who to talk to. You need to build relationships. You need to know how to ask questions. You need to come with genuine curiosity, and just like the best tool for collaboration is checking your ego at the door, the best thing we can do is check our… I don’t know what to call it. Our social anxiety at the door or whatever it is.
Yael:
Just ask questions. Don’t be afraid to look naive or don’t be afraid to not look like an expert. It is being humble and curious is the biggest tool better than knowing how to spell practically. I mean, it’s really takes you so far so fast. They say that if you really want somebody to like you, have them talk about themselves and they’ll walk away thinking you’re brilliant. So, I have never found a stakeholder in any department who when I went in and asked them to teach me their ways and all of the things that they know which then enhanced my work. Nobody had a problem with that. Let’s put it that way. So, what’s my practical advice for help in areas you’re not confident is you don’t need to be confident in all areas, but you need to know who to talk to and how to talk to them and just never stop asking questions and don’t be embarrassed or shy because people will love it, not judge you for it, the opposite.
Larry:
The way you just said that, it’s all of a sudden, it’s just like this little tiny twist on this common phenomenon of imposter syndrome in our field. You just twist that, add a little curiosity, and you’re good to go, it sounds like almost.
Yael:
Basically, basically. I actually gave a talk on your Button about imposter syndrome, but yeah, I have a lot to say on that topic too, but it doesn’t get addressed in this particular book.
Larry:
Got it. Yeah, no, that’s a whole other… Well, that could be your next book. I’m just not to put any pressure on you. Hey, I can’t believe it, Yael. We’re already coming up close to time. These always go way too fast, and I’ll just point out that we barely scratched the surface of the book. We’re scheduling this to launch the podcast right about the time the book comes out. So, we’ll put the publisher kindly offered us a discount code, so we’ll include that in the show notes. But before we wrap up, Yael, is there anything last, anything that has come up in the conversation or that you just want to make sure we get to today?
Yael:
You know what? The thing that I would add is just really if anyone’s listening who’s thinking of writing a book that they should stop thinking and just do it, I mean, I started my book during the pandemic listening to a podcast with Torrey Podmajersky explaining her process and how she decided to write a book and just the way she spoke about it made me think, “Hey, maybe I can do that,” and then I was at a conference where Sarah Winters mentioned that she thinks people should write books and she went through all the excuses we have for not writing them like, “Oh, someone said it before.” Well, yeah, how many design books all say the same thing? Does that mean we don’t need more of them? Or people saying, “Who am I to write a book?” Well, who am I? Who are you not to write a book? We all have something unique to say and how dare you keep your contribution to yourself and not let the community benefit?
Yael:
So, I guess that’s like if I could just really want more voices published and I want… We talk about inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. Well, how can we listen to the voices if those voices aren’t being voiced? So, yeah, if there’s just one thing I’d love to leave with listeners, it’s you do it too. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Buy my book and I’ll buy-
Larry:
That’s fantastic. I love that. Don’t hog your knowledge, you selfish professional. Give it to us. That’s the whole point of this podcast. So, I’m 100% aligned with your take on that. Hey, and one very last thing, Yael, what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch with you? Do you have a website or social media profiles you’d like to share?
Yael:
Sure. So, my website is yaelbendavid.me, and yeah, my handle on Twitter is YaelBenDavid. On LinkedIn, I’m Yael Ben-David. So, yeah, you can pretty much find me there – everywhere.
Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I can’t wait to see the book in print.
Yael:
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and for reading it and your kind review.
Larry:
You betcha.
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