Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS
Wojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland.
Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing “UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products.”
One big challenge he faces when crafting inclusive content in Polish is working with the language’s strongly gendered and inflected grammar.
We talked about:
- his 20+ -year career in content strategy
- his book, “UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products” (currently available only in Polish)
- his take on the design and content professions in Poland
- the importance of inclusion when designing content for Polish-language experiences and the challenges presented by the gendered and inflected nature of the language
- how he teaches plain language, inclusivity, voice and tone, and other content-design principles in his workshops and classes
- the recurring theme of the need to “unlearn” basic grammar and usage concepts to design inclusive experiences in Polish
- his business and economic argument for inclusion, equity, and diversity
- the importance of speaking in the language and using the metrics that are relevant to your business-oriented collaborators
- how he ties content-design efforts to business outcomes
- the importance of teasing out content contributions from broader experience metrics
Wojtek’s bio
Wojtek has been shaping the digital world for almost 25 years, giving it an increasingly human dimension. Whether he supports tech, banking, healthcare, or marketing, he erases the technological dryness of the services and products. His professional radar always pings when it spots inclusion and accessibility challenges. In his product career, Wojtek has worked in many specialties and at various levels, e.g., as an individual contributor or content team leader. In December 2023, he published the book “UX writing. The power of language in digital products” (in Polish). He is a philologist and IT expert by training. After hours, you will find him walking by the sea, reading a comic book, or looking for an authentic Korean restaurant.
Connect with Wojtek online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 182. The profession of content design is notoriously generous and helpful, but most of the resources for practitioners in the field are in English. To support the large and growing content community in Poland, Wojtek Aleksander wrote his book – “UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products” – to address design issues unique to his country, in particular the challenges of crafting inclusive content in a language whose grammar is strongly gendered.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 182 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show, Wojtek Aleksander. Wojtek is a content designer and content strategist. He also does content strategy training and does a lot of stuff in the content world, including, he’s just written a new book called UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products. Unfortunately, the book is only in Polish at this point, but we’re hoping to see a translation one of these days. But welcome to the show, Wojtek. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days.
Wojtek:
Hello. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. I’m talking to you from the north of Poland, from the shore of a cold Baltic Sea, the sea that is colder in summer than the Mediterranean in winter. As you said, I’m a content strategist working in the industry for a long time. My career, it stands over 20 years. I’ve supported different domains and brands, domains like healthcare, banking, application performance management, which is like a server side software, and data analysis, and things like that.
Larry:
Nice. Yeah, because when we first met, we met at a UX writing conference like three or four years ago, and you were working at that big Nordic bank chain at that time.
Wojtek:
True.
Larry:
That’s how I remember. Yeah. It always takes this long to get people on the podcast, but I’d love to learn more about your book. I feel a little ambivalent about it because only the Polish people get to read it at this point, but I’m really pulling for the translation soon. But tell us a little bit about the scope of that. I love the way you phrased the subtitle, “The Power of Language in Digital Product.” That seems like what we’re all about.
Wojtek:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. True, true. The power of language, that’s how we want to see things, and that’s how they work. So the book, yeah, it’s in Polish because we needed that book in Poland. I learned over the years working with different people that language was a little bit of a barrier like all the seminal books on content strategy are in English. On UX writing, they are all in English, and content design, they’re all in English, and all the materials come from the English side speaking of the world. There was a big hunger for some resources in Polish, especially that the language is specific and at times, difficult, a little bit different than English. So the examples and also guidelines are needed to be adjusted. Yeah. The book walks you through the world of content design like starting with the fundamentals like accessibility, inclusion, where there’s kind of quite a substantial part of the book actually, and then going further into UX writing life processes and different content types that you have to deal with in the UI, ending with some leadership challenges and lookouts to the future of the profession.
Larry:
I would love to… Anyhow, I’m already just thinking of a machine translation to just get the gist of it. But anyhow, one of the things you just said, it occurs to me that the book was needed. So there’s a large enough number of content practitioners in Poland to justify a book. Do you have a feel for how big is the UX world and the content design and the whole tech world in Poland?
Wojtek:
I would say it’s pretty large. What’s interesting is we export and work most of the time. So people doing UX writing in Poland, they work for multinational companies. Several years ago, when I tried to count people in Poland with a UX writing title, there were just a handful. Now, I’m not even starting because that number is pretty large, people with various degree of experience, some of them over five years, and then mostly three to five years experience. So that discipline actually is booming because UX in general, I think, it’s also a thing in Poland as a discipline and a profession.
Larry:
It’s a good-sized country. It’s almost, what, 40 million people or something like that.
Wojtek:
Exactly. Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. That’s not as big as France or Germany, but it’s way bigger than the Netherlands where I live. Yeah. Well, one of the things you mentioned about the book, the scope was the focus on accessibility and inclusion. We had a chat last week about some of the unique challenges, especially around inclusion when you’re working in the Polish language. Can you talk a little bit about… Well, I guess I’m wondering two things about that. One, just the particulars of that like how you cope with that, but also how much it came to dominate the book. Was it just a recurring theme that just came up over and over again?
Wojtek:
Yeah, this is the absolute base of, I think, any kind of human centered writing, especially if you do that in a language like Polish, which is an inflected language. That means like Latin, Finnish. It has different grammatical cases where different words have different endings depending on the grammatical context. What is also interesting or challenging in Polish is that we have… It’s a highly gendered language. We have three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Up to some point, we used to believe that those genders in language, they are purely grammatical. But now, as we learn more about world and we hear more people talking about themselves, their identity, how they see themselves, what language also does to them, we noticed that those genders are no longer purely grammatical, but they are about almost semantic in this sense. Yeah. In some cases, it might even be like some sort of a manifesto, the grammatical form that you use.
Wojtek:
One of the largest problems with this is that, and we experience that not only in Polish, but in French, also Spanish, that the dominant gender, the default gender, whenever you wanted to generalize, talk about a larger number of people, you would use masculine forms, which of course has the whole baggage of the patriarchal system and consequences of that, removing a specific groups of people from the conversation. So we kind of now work on inclusive language to give space to everyone and have that equity in the language so that everyone is included so that we don’t exclude everyone.
Wojtek:
In Polish, it’s especially difficult because like I said, you can have noun or your verb or even a numeral, they can have gendered endings. So if you wanted to say a sentence like, “I won the race because I was the first,” so that part, “I won,” would already be like a specific gender. Then, “the first” would also have a gendered ending, so if that was a woman saying that, she would use feminine endings. A man would use masculine endings, and then someone non-binary will have a problem.
Wojtek:
So that’s a deep problem because it’s not only about pronouns. It’s also not only about the word endings themselves because that would be the level of morphology. How do you build the words? That’s how it all started actually. Also, in other European countries like Germany and France, where people will try to just include two different endings at the end of the word, and that would kind of already signal like, “Yes, we’re kind of inclusive,” but still two genders, binary point of view, and some accessibility problems with those forms as well, so yeah.
Larry:
That’s it. It ripples out so quickly because when we talked last week, you talked about… You didn’t say it this way, but to me, I was hearing like, “Yeah, you guys got it so good. You just have pronouns. You figured that out, and you’re good to go.” And you’re like, “No, this is embedded throughout deep into the language.” At a pragmatic level. So it’s hard enough being a content designer. There’s so much just getting the proverbial seat at the table and all that stuff. But getting to that point of once you’ve decided what you’re going to say, that key juncture where you become a UX writer, what does the word crafting look like? Because I know we’ve networked in a lot of international events, so I know you know content designers around the world. Do you have a feel for how much harder your job is?
Wojtek:
It’s challenging. I don’t know if I can value how much harder it is, but that’s true. Using those languages, that they have genders, that they have inflected vocabulary, this is really different, especially if you want to be inclusive. Sometimes it’s about unlearning things. In the case of plain language, for example, we say like, “Oh, I had to unlearn many things that they taught me at school using this flowery language. Now, I am supposed to speak plain language. I have to unlearn things.” And here, you need to unlearn many phrases. You have to also unlearn to build sentences in a specific structure because you will end up in that word ending problem. When you write, talk, or whatever you do with words, you have to think, “What is the subject?” Before you say write that, you have to already determine whether the rest of the sentence will be gendered, for example. So that’s an additional challenge, and it’s really, really hard because we don’t really have all the tools to do that for various reasons.
Larry:
Did you have to develop some of that? Like in your practice, just the, I don’t know, that kind of grammatical and usage toolkit like your own style manual or something like that to guide people? Because I know you do training around… I don’t know if you specifically include this in the trainings you do, but to the extent that you work with other people to help them do this, have you had to develop your own sort of tooling for that?
Wojtek:
That’s exactly what you need to do, and yeah, true. I also include that in my training because it’s kind of getting back to some of the writing techniques that you might have forgotten, focusing mostly on, for example, plain language, the number of words, and the vocabulary. Here, you need to start thinking about exactly that level of who talks to whom like who is addressed, who is described. Do I need to say that? You can have a list, and that’s what actually we did, for example, for one of my latest healthcare projects where we developed a set of guidelines, which is like a toolkit like, “Use this grammatical form. Use this as a subject. Change the subject and the verb, and then use the verb in this form. Change the tense and stuff like that.” So we developed that. We had a quick workshop, which are of all the available resources, which ones we want to use mostly for our products so that it kind of fits the tone and voice, the tone of specific messages and the voice in general.
Wojtek:
Because some of the writing techniques might not be useful in specific domains, for example, or if you write for localization, that’s also something to consider. You wouldn’t probably use regional forms, which can help you sound, for example, impersonal. That is like neutral, but they want to translate well, or they will be a puzzle for people who localize it to a different market. Yeah, so it boils down to creating your own writing toolkit and then mastering it because there is also this challenge. Listing those tools and knowing that they exist is one thing, but then you have to practice, and that’s what I talked about. I’m learning some specific way of how you form sentences. This is something that you learn where you’re like a toddler, how to form a sentence, and now, you have to think how you form that sentence again.
Larry:
Yeah, like you said a few minutes ago, you have to unlearn the original way. But again, and you also use the analogy back then of plain language that like, “Yeah, get over that fancy stuff you learned in college. You need to talk to regular people now,” and it seems like it’s analogous, but the other thing is you were just talking. I’m picturing 4-D chess or something because we always have like a grid of the voice of the brand and then the tone in this particular situation, and then you have this additional axis of who’s talking to whom, and it sounds like there’s other things in there. But basically, like you said, it’s a matter of whatever those dimensions are and considerations. You document them for yourself, and then you just practice, practice, practice.
Wojtek:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I like that multidimensional-chess analogy because it’s something like that. Yeah. It’s this additional axis and then also some strategy behind that also like how you want to move. True, true.
Larry:
Yeah. I had Jenny Scribani on a while back talking about messaging frameworks. I think I was kind of picturing her grid because she has this kind of, not 4-D, but like a complex grid for messaging architecture, documentation, and how to implement them. It sounds very much in that tool, but I guess that kind of gets to the point. And that’s why I wanted to talk, even though we’re talking specifically about the Polish language. The lessons you’ve learned in how to incorporate it into your practice, that seems totally like anybody could do that with any challenge they’re facing that kind of process you just set out. So thanks for that. I think that’s very useful.
Larry:
Hey, one thing, it occurred to me as we’re talking too that this focus on inclusion presumes that there’s buy-in from the design leaders and product leaders and other folks that you’re working with, that inclusion is good and a goal of the company. Is that true, or do you have to advocate for that?
Wojtek:
That’s a difficult question in this sense that organically, I think I’ve never met a person on a content team who would not want to go with an inclusive language, and then, I also have to advocate for that too much. Although now, I remember one of the companies where it was really a problem, for example, to have a gender selection box have more than two entries. So yes, in some cases, this might be a difficult challenge. I don’t have good advice how to deal with it because if there’s such a strong opposition, maybe it has to be boiled down to money because actually… And that’s also something what I talk about in the book. We already have a group of people in the market and started to live in this world already with the values of inclusion, equity, diversity in place. They don’t know the world that could exclude you a lot, or they can name different biases. They are now entering the market, and they start to spend money. Yeah, you need to talk their language anyway so-
Larry:
Is it largely a generational thing in that sense? Because I think you’re right that the generation coming up behind us is way more inclusive, just seems to me and across many cultures that I’m familiar with, that it seems like it’s… I mean, I think any human centered designer is concerned with inclusion, I think. Like you said, there’s both the fact that it’s considered a matter-of-fact assumption of one generation, but there might be a generation ahead of them who are designing these experiences for whom it’s less natural. Is that a challenge?
Wojtek:
I don’t know. I mean, the perceptions that we talked about, yes, I’m convinced that they exist and that there are different mindsets already around diversity and inclusion. But I think being inclusive, I wouldn’t link that with generations, I think. Yeah. I come from a generation that you could assume has nothing to do with inclusion, but I’m talking about it now and many of our colleagues as well. I think it’s all a matter of maybe your personal also experiences and stuff like that where you kind of get quicker on that train. Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. You reminded me of something we talked about last week that it’s about a mindset shift. That it’s not like a particular skill or anything, and everybody comes to it from a different way and comes more naturally to some people. Some people have to work at it. It’s just like any kind of competency. I think it’s probably like in that way. Does that make sense? Is that-
Wojtek:
Yeah, yeah. We can look at it as a competence, for sure. You can learn it. Of course, it’s much more than that because it’s something that you need to have in your heart. I believe and suppose it’s super hard to be two-faced in this, so not inclusive in your private life and then inclusive when you do your business writing, for example, or application writing or UX writing. Yeah, because that would be hard.
Larry:
Yeah, no. The way you just said that too, it reminds me. I think the core competency that all of us really need nowadays, especially with AI and everything else going on, is that notion of human authenticity. Like you just said, you have to have it in your heart, and people will feel it if you don’t, I think.
Wojtek:
True.
Larry:
Yeah.
Wojtek:
True, true.
Larry:
Another thing, kind of related to the buy-in question, there’s also another kind of adjacent thing in our world now is just the whole, not buy-in, but the business rationale for our work. I think in some quarters, there’s two issues there. I think that there’s one… In some places, they’re just like that some people would say that not enough content designers are concerned with thinking about business impact, and I think a lot of them do. Maybe some of them less, but maybe more concerned with the design side of things. There’s that, but then there’s just also, not the disconnect, but the fact that executives and high-level leaders in companies think about things in different ways than we do as designers. Can you talk about some of your thoughts around how you show the impact to those folks who are just all revenue and income based and lifetime customer value and all that stuff? Have you had success kind of attaching content activities to their goals and needs?
Wojtek:
Yeah, yeah. You need it. Speak the language of your customer, right? That’s the premise. I think it’s super hard for many of us in content design discipline because I think when you mentioned people kind of focus on company money, let’s say, they are less concerned about metrics that we usually look at, that is kind of experience metrics, right? Because this is what we love, and that’s what we always strive to affect, the experience metrics. But then, somehow, that’s true that people who can look at spreadsheets and all the numbers, they may feel that disconnect between the experience metric and their business metrics, recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, or churn and stuff like that, or new customer acquisition costs and stuff like that. I think those are the things that we, as content designers or as the whole discipline, everyone, especially in more senior positions or leadership positions, we need to switch quickly to looking at that and being able to prove that we not only affect the experience metrics, which is hard in some cases.
Wojtek:
But then, how does the content do that, right? What happened thanks to our work that we are now keeping people longer or that it’s cheaper to acquire new customers, which is already expensive and things like that. What I also started doing some time ago is to try to somehow build this model, I don’t know how to call it, like approach, where you would first prepare the product to give you the container, the layer for the proper content to work. So something like this usually requires some sort of design work because it might be how the look like new screen or redoing a screen or adding something to a screen or a page, and then you need to develop that.
Wojtek:
But then, thinking ahead like, “Okay, there will be some content that is supposed to do some good for the business,” so how am I going to now make use of that container that they created for me to experiment with my variants of content to be able to say, “Hey, before we started, the numbers were like this. That was our baseline. And then, we launched. We saw a little bit effect of that, and now, we are trying to affect numbers even better”? Then, that thinking where you have those first harder to implement features, and then you have your space for your experimentation with content only, which does not require coding, does not require design, then you are able to somehow support yourself from the other results because there’s just one, let’s say, factor that is changing. It’s the content.
Wojtek:
Of course, that’s not possible in many contexts where the application is a little bit more solid and stable, but there are some contexts where you can do that and try to think in this way, “How do I build that infrastructure for ourselves, for the content team to prove the value of content, something like that, something that we didn’t do?” Also, those business metrics are maybe not our favorite because they also require some sort of writing that is not maybe everybody’s favorite. It’s kind of more business-oriented rather than user-oriented in some cases. But yeah.
Larry:
As you’re talking about that, it’s kind of the holy grail for me. I think it seems like there’s an opportunity looming with the arrival of decoupled architectures and where you can craft content to an intent and a purpose independent of its presentation and somehow measure that. If you could then tie that to OKRs or something, then you’re in the C-suite going, “See! I told you. I need a big raise now.” That’s my dream anyway. Wojtek, I can’t believe that we’re coming up close to time already. But before we wrap up, is there anything you want to share with the folks before we close?
Wojtek:
Yeah, thanks. I think plugging into what we have just said about affecting the business, understanding of the value of content, I think what my message to my colleagues would be find ways to really prove that it’s not only the UX, but the content within that work that was designed affects the results. And why? Because now, it’s really hard to keep your job with all sorts of mass layoffs, and sadly, we saw many content people let go first, but now, in the world of design systems and patterns, design languages, and then good content and opportunities to design with content first, we have a chance to be part of UX and kind of detach ourselves in thinking about the value that we really deliver to the business, not only to the user. This is super important, the value for the users, because that’s how many things keep rolling. But then, those people who look at the spreadsheets, they need to see us there in those spreadsheets, and it’s a challenge for us to figure out the ways to secure our position.
Larry:
That sounds like another mindset shift that we need to do. Just like get inside that business person’s head just a little bit more and adopt their mindset and think about how we’re helping them.
Wojtek:
Yeah.
Larry:
Nice. Hey, one very last thing, Wojtek. If folks want to connect online or follow you, what’s the best way to find you online?
Wojtek:
Sure thing. The easiest is to find me on LinkedIn. I’m super active there. Reply to messages specifically if you write why you want to contact me, so for sure, LinkedIn is the best place.
Larry:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Wojtek. I always enjoy talking with you, and this was a fun conversation.
Wojtek:
Awesome. Awesome conversation, great questions. I’m super happy that we had a chance to do that again.
Leave a Reply