Yuval Keshtcher: UX Writing Community Builder – Episode 62

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Yuval Keshtcher is building a community around the new field of UX writing. 

He first discovered the need for UX writing as a product designer. Since then, Yuval has convened product writers in discussion forums and classes. He studies the field constantly and hosts a podcast on Writers in Tech. This fall, he’ll host a UX writing conference.

Yuval and I talked about:

• his background as a graphic designer, a soldier, a product designer, and an entrepreneur
• how he discovered the need for UX writing in his work as a product designer
• the growth in the interest in topics like microcopy, UI content, etc.
• how his work developing a community around UX writing led to him launching courses on the subject
• his ongoing work to keep his course content updated
• the diverse backgrounds of UX writers: “if you put the ten UX writers in a room, all of them would probably have different backgrounds”
• the skills set that you need to succeed as a UX writer: curiosity, research skills, empathy, and other UX skills
• how the digital revolution has brought the need for UX writing skills to the fore
• the arrival and growth of the UX profession
• the difference between experience design and visual design
• the business benefits of UX design
• the importance of collaboration in UX work and how UX writers are often the bridge between teams and products
• how the communication skills that UX writers bring to a team can improve the team experience
• his new UX writing conference, UX Salon WORDS, happening in Tel Aviv November 2020

Links to resources that Yuval mentions in the interview:

• Don Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things
• Don Norman’s TED Talks
• Steve Jobs’ iPhone announcement presentation

Yuval’s Bio

Yuval Keshtcher is the founder of the UX Writing Hub, an education platform for writers in tech from all over the world. Yuval and his team are working these days on a UX Writing conference in Tel Aviv.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

The field of UX writing – sometimes called content design or product content strategy – has emerged over the past decade or so. As often happens with a new discipline, folks getting into the field can feel a bit lost as they look for resources and expertise. Yuval Keshtcher is building a community to help folks navigate this new profession. He runs discussion forums, offers online courses, hosts a UX writing podcast, and is organizing a new conference. If you want to understand this new field, Yuval can help.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 62 of the content strategy insights podcast. I’m really happy today to say that I have with us Yuval and I’m going to let Yuval pronounce his last name because I’m not a native Hebrew speaker. Yuval Welcome to the show. Tell the folks how to pronounce your last name . . .

Yuval:
The name is Yuval Keshtcher and thank you for having me. I must say that I’m a big fan and I’m really excited to be here.

Larry:
I’m super excited. It’s very mutual because I think you’re in the most exciting part of this field right now. My podcast courses about content strategy in general, but I think the hottest most interesting part of that field is this whole field of UX writing. The first thing I always like to ask people is how did you end up here? We all have different pathways into this field. How did you come to be interested in UX writing?

Yuval:
Okay. I started as a graphic designer. I was playing around with Photoshop when I was a teenager and went to the army when I was 18 because in Israel it’s mandatory to go to the army. Finish with that after three years and a pharmacist doing different kinds of gigs. It felt like literally doing rounds around the world and looking for what should I do with my life. I figured out that I will just keep doing graphic design because that’s what brings joy to my life. From graphic designer I did the transition to product design, UX design, web design, and that’s how we used to call it. Just because I was tired to do like freelance gig for restaurants and stuff like that. Like print stuff. I was looking for the next challenge.

Yuval:
I was tired of like running after clients. In Israel, it’s very common like to chase your clients, they will pay you eventually. I figured out that I would look for something a bit more serious, a bit more stable. I must say that during the whole journey entrepreneurship was also something that I was always trying to do. I was always trying to build something new from scratch and I was always looking for some kind of a niche and I must say that I failed multiple times creating stuff. I must say that after understanding what I love to do and what I need to do, I also found a way to create something new in that field.

Larry:
Great. I want to fast forward a little bit because I think you now identify as a product designer and a very UX-focused product designer.

Yuval:
Correct.

Larry:
One of the things you do is your UX writing course. Actually let me back up from that a little bit because the need for that course is really interesting to me. The fact that we’re in this time period where UX writing – and I think there’s also other names it goes by like product content or content design or content developer I’ve heard – there’s a bunch of different names for it. How did that come to your attention and how did you decide to focus on that?

Yuval:
Alright. Imagine that I tried to say that I don’t care at all about writers and there is a very big need right now in the market for writers in tech. Okay. I used to work as a product designer for different companies, different startup companies in Israel and there wasn’t any writer in the team, no one that will create the copy of the digital interface. That was my responsibility. My product manager was like, Hey, I need a little bit more context over here and I need a little bit more context over there. It was in English, I’m not a native writer, so I was looking for many resources for product writing basically. It was maybe 2016 so I couldn’t find many resources.

Yuval:
I started the Facebook group and the name of the Facebook group is Microcopy and UX Writing. I was just start to create every piece of content that I possibly could and share it with the Facebook group. At first there wasn’t anyone in the Facebook group. It was me and a bunch of friends that I invited. At some point I noticed that there are a little bit more people that are publishing content about the idea of microcopy and the idea of writing interface for products and that there are starting to be different kinds of methodologies and best practices that people are sharing. Every day I was just publishing in the Facebook groups microcopy examples articles. I also invited all of the authors of these articles to join the discussion. I think that was a smart move because then the discussion became just from Yuval and a bunch of friends to like a professional discussion.

Yuval:
At some point it just started to explode organically. Many people just came to the discussion from different companies, share different ideas, share different best practices. At some point I decided that I want to create content for the community. I started to interview people from the industry and share it with the community, like share their best practices. And that’s what I did for a while. I interviewed people from PayPal and Wix and Fiverr and many big companies that hire writers to do the product writing shared it with the community. The responses were pretty great. Many people were asking me for actual course for actual education. At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. I felt that there are probably other people that should do it and I will just keep like managing the community.

Yuval:
At some point I just figured out the amount of research that I did on that topic and the amount of ideas and best practices and methodologies that I’ve learned along with also collaborating with more writers to help me. Of course, I’m not alone with the team of the UX training hub, but at some point we understood that we could build some kind of course that will define how you expect us should work today in the industry. Today we help our students to work in the biggest companies in banks and we’re doing this end to end process of… I don’t like to say “zero to hero,” but we’re really trying to help them to find a job as UX writers. The Facebook group at first, but now a big community of people that are in our newsletter and listen to our podcast and it’s almost 60,000 people right now.

Larry:
Holy cow!

Yuval:
Yeah, I was about to say that we’re creating a lot of massive amount of content for the community and also we have the best practices to kind of educate about this exciting new field of UX writing. I must say that there is a lot more to learn. We are always improving our product. We are always improving our content. I always keep up with the research and the best practices and the best tools. That’s also the reason I’m doing Writers in Tech podcast because I want to interview people and ask them about their processes and understand more best practices. Today we even like helping companies to hire UX writers so companies approach us, they ask us how they should hire, how should they approach this process and we give them all of the advice that we possibly can.

Larry:
Well, I got to say I love that story because this … you have this one very specific part of your job. Like, I need copy in this product interface that I’m working on and all of a sudden this 60,000-person community and multiple products and a podcast and everything else has emerged from this like little nugget of curiosity back there. That’s really impressive.

Yuval:
Thank you.

Larry:
I want to tell. You’ve obviously learned a lot along the way in this.

Yuval:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Larry:
One of the things and you just alluded to this, like that companies are coming to you to help with recruiting. I think the other side of that equation – half my friends in Seattle right now are looking to get into UX writing or are in UX writing. Is there a common pathway or there certain careers that are best suited to UX writing? Then regardless of that kind of what are the skills you need, what are the things that employers are looking for?

Yuval:
That’s a very good question. I guess that I was on record saying it many times. I always say that if you put the ten UX writers in a room, all of them would probably have different backgrounds. It’s not necessarily like that. A lot of people are coming from journalism a lot of people are coming from marketing and the UX designers that are doing the transition to UX writing, content writers. Yeah. That would probably the background of people, but I must say the background can be also psychology and many different unique path to this role. The second question that you ask was which kind of skills do you need to have in order to do that? I just had a conversation about it today, but I would say that curiosity you need to understand how to do research because I believe that one of the most important things before designing an interface or writing an interface or creating any kind of experience is to empathize with your users.

Yuval:
Understand who are your users, who are your listeners for the podcast. Like we can have a discussion about who are the listeners for podcasts or we need to have this guy or the people that are going to use our platform. What is their pain points? What is their goals? If we’re talking about UX writing, we also need to ask ourselves how do they talk, which kind of language do they use? How can we create conversations with them? What would be negative approach? What would be positive approach? Which kind of voice and tone we should use and how can we create an alignment between all of our products. The messaging will be consistent to these kind of users. Yeah. That’s the kind of skills you need to have.

Larry:
Right? As you said that, you’re reminding me I love this quote, I use it all the time now that William Gibson, the science fiction author said “the future is here it’s just unevenly distributed.” There’s been like all that language you just used about, it’s the common language of any content strategist, whether you’re doing content marketing or website stuff or a SaaS product or a mobile app or whatever it is you’re working on. There’s all those things about voice and tone and alignment with what else is going on and tying all those things together. When I say the future is here, but it’s just unevenly distributed, like I was just thinking last night about a friend of mine who worked in 1996 I think like 24 years ago?

Larry:
24 years ago a guy named Clement Mach had left Apple and started this design firm in San Francisco called Studio Archetype. I had a friend, she and I had worked together a couple of years before that I had her on the show a while back and she was talking about the teams that they had there. It sounded like all the stuff you just said they were doing 24 years ago, but it didn’t catch on. It didn’t really take off. What do you think is different now and like when you think about like the work that Karen McGrane did at RazorFish 20 years ago or folks like that this, a lot of these practices have been around, what do you think is going on that has made it finally kind of explode and erupt like it has?

Yuval:
Okay. I think that we had some kind of a digital revolution in the past few years. Okay?

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Yuval:
All of the services were digitalized the way that we are using banking services, the way that we communicate with each other, everything just changed completely. It’s really difficult to put your finger on what part of history it happened. I would say that it probably happened when the first iPhone was launched, probably. That’s where UX was starting to evolve. It’s not exactly where you start to evolve. We had Don Norman that was talking about UX back in the 90s because it was a user experience architect in Apple and he was talking more about like packaging and the feeling that you have when you smell a new Apple product and like how it looks like and how it feels. He was talking about experience back then. Don Norman is also a very famous set design book, The Design of Everyday Things.

Larry:
The Design of Everyday Things. Yeah. I’ve got a copy. I’m looking around. . .

Yuval:
Exactly. You can also look for his TED Talks his a very fascinating guy.

Yuval:
Epic was the first to talk about user experience and they were the first to create the iPhone and the mobile apps that basically changed everything. If you will see like the first announcement of the iPhone, the vision and I recommend to add to the show notes too. The vision of Steve Jobs was, okay, no more buttons like it’s all about software right now and everything. We could do a lot of crazy things using that software and when we start to build these kind of softwares. You had a lot of I would say inequivalence between different apps, a few were a little bit more intuitive than others. In others there were an amazing technology but a lot of user frustrations at the same time. People just realized and understood that the digital products that have better user experience, that create less frustration for the users, would just bring more customers to the business. Okay. Better UX and better design, equal more money to your business, to your company. It’s not only about the technology like it used to be before the digital revolution. Okay?

Larry:
Right.

Yuval:
Today I can create and design fantastic systems without developing any technology but only use logic and common sense and design. That’s what we did when we built the student progress tracker for the UX Training Hub and we didn’t need developers to create any new technology. We used existing tools but we designed it in a way that it would actually work.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Yuval:
It will be useful and it will work. That’s what UX is all about. Now that we have UX and there was a big rise in the idea of UX design, there was a big misconception because many people thought that UX design means that it needs to look pretty. Okay. When you say design in Hebrew people say okay you are doing a design, make it pretty also in English people might think that if someone is talking about a design is talking about the fact that it’s pretty, but that’s not the case.

Yuval:
Design is how it works and how it feels and how it’s used basically. Okay. It can be aesthetic and beautiful but at the end of the day it doesn’t work the design is bad and broken. We had a rise in UX design and we had a lot of misconceptions and we had to sell UX as a thing for different organizations because stakeholders and company owners, didn’t quite understood what UX is all about. After people just realize that products that have better use experience have more clients and they have more less churn, more retention, more conversions. Where people are coming back to companies that have products with great design.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Yuval:
That’s about design. What I feel is that UX writers are product designers, they design experiences using better communication.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah. As you were talking there I was reminded of some of the … because I think part of the way that develops is that people who do master it and do well, people pay attention to them and go, wow, why is Apple doing so well? I think specifically when you think of UX writing and product content, like there are so many companies that while it might not be their core competency, it’s an important competency at places like MailChimp and Shopify and Intercom that they are really mastering, they have really well developed internal content practices on their product teams. I feel like that might’ve lagged a little bit behind all the stuff you were just talking about because a lot of that, like it was, what God! That’s 13 years ago now that the iPhone came out.

Yuval:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Larry:
That’s sort of like push that and then it, but it’s only been like I think maybe five years over the time span where people are really recognizing if you have embedded content people on your product team, you end up with a way better user experience. Does that make sense?

Yuval:
It makes complete sense. People were all about we need a better UX design, we need better UX design. They started hiring people from other graduates that not necessarily understand human psychology, but more about visuals. That misconception, just create a complete cluster and then I think that somehow the writers were left out.

Yuval:
I think that now people more people understand that they shouldn’t be left out at any point they should be there from the first days.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey this is reminded me of … I don’t know if we’ve completed the list of skills, but I think one of the skills that’s at the top of any person on any UX team is collaboration. It just occurs to me as you’re talking that a lot of traditional writing practice has been solitary. Like the people who come out of journalism and copywriting and other writing professions. I’ve struggled with it at times, but I’m older too. I wonder if younger people are just more naturally able to just take their writing practice into a UX context where it’s a lot about collaboration now. Two things there. One, is it safe to assume that collaboration is one of those top skills for UX practitioner? And are there unique challenges to like writers or other professions in terms of like being good at collaboration?

Yuval:
I would say that the most important skill for a UX writer is to be a great collaborator because first of all the fracture between designers and writers it can be very high. What I’m trying to say is that you probably have in most productive teams today more designers than writers. You would see probably one writer work on three products or three projects at the same time. While doing that, they have to collaborate with that designer in that project and then they find themselves in a position, like many writers these days told me that they find some kind of a solution with one designer, but then they suggest that solution with a designer from complete different project, completely different team. That’s how they became some kind of a bridge, bridging between different products in their organization. They are a bridge between the business needs and the user needs. They’re kind of working as pretty awesome communicators for a product, for a company.

Larry:
That’s great. I love that perspective because it kind of runs counter to … You know Jonathan Coleman at Intercom?

Yuval:
Yeah.

Larry:
Jonathan’s, he’s a friend of mine and we were just talking –

Yuval:
He’s amazing. I flew to his workshop once.

Larry:
Did you? Yeah, totally worth flying around the world to see that guy.

Yuval:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Larry:
One of the things he talks about is the importance – and similarly … I had Kylie Hanson on the show a few episodes ago. She leads a content design team at Microsoft – and both of them would argue that some of the best, the biggest benefits come when you embed a single content designer on a product team. These are granted, these are bigger products, but what you just said about this being a connector across products, that there’s probably a benefit like for all of the trouble there, the challenges of working on multiple products at one time. It seems like there could be potentially a huge benefit there just bringing practice ideas and kind of cross-pollination. Is that something you’re seeing in their field?

Yuval:
Yeah, exactly. You can definitely see how the fact that there is a writer on the team. As I said before, it really create better communication that eventually create an alignment of the messaging for the users which is fantastic. You can just see the differences really well between companies that practice it and have UX writers onboard companies to just failed to onboard UX writers or they don’t have enough UX writers so they suffer from it a little bit more. You can see that in these companies you have like long forms, very tedious kind of tests that user’s needs to do.

Yuval:
When you compare it to the companies that do have UX writers on their teams who can immediately see you mentioned few of these companies and you can see intuitive user experience fun and it’s been really good for marketing at the end of the day because you can see that people enjoying microcopy just take a screenshot post it on social media or even better like it can be product announcements that writers communicate how we should use the product in a better way or different suggestions. There are many ways to create content that it can also kind of a little bit overlap on the marketing side of things, but not in a nasty way, like in a really nice way.

Larry:
I totally hear you. In fact, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve articulated in my mind what I think of as the three flavors of content strategy, kind of the marketing and business stuff. Then the product stuff and then the technical stuff and as soon as I compartmentalize them I’m thinking, no, there’s a lot of connections between them. I think the product people can learn from the marketing people, the technical people can share. . . . There should be a lot of overlap there but I noticed this always goes so fast. I noticed we’re already coming up close to the end of the time.

Larry:
I like to keep these under a half hour but Yuval before we wrap up I want to make sure I give you a two things. One, you do a lot of stuff, like you mentioned your podcast, you mentioned the UX Writing Hub you mentioned … anyhow I can’t keep up with all this stuff you do. I want you to give us a rundown of all this stuff that you’re up to, but also if there’s anything last, anything that hasn’t come up in this conversation that you want to make sure you share with my folks. I want to make sure you get that in as well.

Yuval:
Alright, My team and I are working on a UX writing conference in Tel Aviv. It’s going to be in November and the dates are the 3rd and the 4th. There’s going to be one day of speakers, one day of workshops, the name of the conferences is UX Salon WORDS, the name is awards I love that name.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Yuval:
That’s about it. Feel free to follow the youth training hub weekly newsletter for more updates and the podcast writers in tech. If you feel like you want to step into the UX writing the field, I recommend to take our free course. You can just go to our website. There’s a free course just to see like what it’s about, but in a very small and the concise bites so you can check it out as well. What else? Yeah, listen to writers and tech podcast. It’s a podcast where I interview industry leaders and I learn enough from it and I’m sure if you will listen to it too, you will learn this.

Larry:
I’ll say that I do listen to that podcast and as it gets great, I enjoy it. I kind of take the more general content strategy approach and this one and you’re just totally focused on UX writing and product content. I love that. I’ve also got to say, I heard just pretty much every day on Twitter or Facebook, people complain about the lack of conferences in Europe and the Middle East. It seems like all the Confab and everything happens over here in the US. I think you’ll probably get a lot of interest having a conference that doesn’t require a transatlantic flight.

Yuval:
I am so stressed, I never organized a conference in my life and I promise to the podcast episode back in 2019 that in 2020 I will organize a UX writing conference and I flew to Europe to understand where could possibly do it. They thought it would be in Berlin or maybe in Kraków but the end of the day and from Tel Aviv everything logistic wise was so much more easy to organize over there. My idea is to do the event in Tel Aviv, but at some point we might do also a few more in Europe and we might come to the States also, if we will see that there is going to be more demand for it.

Larry:
That’s great. Well, good luck with that. I’ve done a lots of event organizing myself. If you ever want to talk about that offline, just give me a shout. It’s crazy making, but it’s totally worth, it’s the best thing ever.

Yuval:
Yeah when am meeting everyone in person.

Larry:
Exactly. Yeah. In real life. That’s my favorite experience. Thanks so much Yuval. This has been a great conversation and I look forward to keeping it going over the years.

Yuval:
Thank you so much for having me. It was amazing. Thanks.