This is the published edition of our weekly UX writer and UX writing newsletter, The Dash. Sign up to The Dash to have these updates sent straight to your inbox!
Can you believe we’re almost halfway through the year? Wild, right? We’ve got some really exciting stuff coming to UX Writers Collective very, very soon. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been up to the past few months. For now, we’ve got another Dash featuring lots of links and things, new events, and tools you might enjoy. Click away.
NEWS YOU NEED
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Your Figma questions answered. Want to get started in Figma, but don’t know where to begin? Curious about how to get the most out of the tool? Join Patrick Stafford, co-CEO at UX Writers Collective, and instructors Carly Gray and Sammie Spector to get your burning Figma questions answered. Register for the free webinar!
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Building a content design guild. How can you rally everyone in your organization around a community of practice instead of operating within mini-siloed kingdoms? This is the story of how Tom Waterton and Maranda Bodas broke down barriers to create a strong content fortress at IBM.
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Recipe for accessible testing. Although there is no one-size-fits-all mold, Kate Kalcevich and Mike Gifford introduce layered accessibility testing as a way to use different tools and techniques at every stage of the design process to catch issues before they’re baked into the product. And who doesn’t love a good food analogy?
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Let’s uncover our assumptions. Journey mapping gives teams the chance to step back, see the whole picture, and grow their systems thinking skills. Over on Shopify’s design blog, Sara Hill outlines how the team uses journey maps to align folks from the get-go. Rightfully so.
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Archaeology and UX writing? Bet you’ve never thought of the two fields together? In the latest WorkingInContent.com feature, Jane Ruffino shares how her dual content and archaeologist careers simultaneously complement one another. She refers to it as, “bringing the relationship between people alive through ‘things.’” Definitely dig into her fascinating background.
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5 design portfolio mistakes. Jessica Ko has recruited designers at Google for 7+ years, so she’s reviewed quite a few portfolios. And she’s sharing top mistakes to avoid when creating your own. Read on for how to build a stand-out portfolio that gets you hired.
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Content is hard. Fact: Content has never been more important, but the truth is it’s freaking hard. In this blog post for Gather Content, co-founder and product director Angus Edwardson outlines three effective components of ContentOps to level up the way we all work with, uh, content.
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Skill up your own way. “If kerning excites you, and you find yourself in a YouTube rabbithole for hours, embrace it!” Skilling up doesn’t always involve learning a shiny new design tool. Slack content designer TJ Lee weighs in on useful design skills for UX writers to focus on.
- Quick poll: Which title describes your role? Do you identify as a UX writer, content designer, or content strategist? Let us know in this quick LinkedIn poll.
TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
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Ditto variants. How do you work on and preview alternatives, translations, or text that changes depending on user segment? Our friends at Ditto just launched a new solution—meet Variants!
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Rewrite the web. Polish lets you do just that… sort of. With this Chrome extension, you can edit text on any webpage to see how it would look in the wild, test, and iterate until you get it just right. Check it out.
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Figma tips. With this super-duper plug-in, you can play Figma tutorial videos while designing to follow along and get through any hiccups. Check back weekly for more tips.