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Whether you’re working with a full team of content designers or you’re managing product designers, developers, and other team members who need to write UI strings, it’s crucial to make sure everyone is starting from the same set of principles.
Unfortunately, many aren’t aligned on the best principles. Sometimes this happens when teams scale quickly and you have several junior UX writers and content designers working alongside seniors or leads. Other times it can happen when you don’t have enough dedicated content designers and you rely on members in other roles to write strings.
Without a shared basis to make UX writing decisions, you experience more inconsistencies that erode user trust.
That lack of trust turns into bigger problems: churn, declining rates of feature completion, and time and money spent on support. Training your team with a foundation in UX writing principles results in several benefits.
Aligning your team with best practices and principles ensures you spend less time arguing about why you’re making a decision and more time discussing what the best outcome for the user will be.
Your UX writers and content designers can focus on creating exceptional user experiences rather than debating the basics in yet another meeting or over Slack.
With everyone on the same page, your team can make faster, more confident decisions that drive better outcomes for your business. Plus, you can focus on bigger challenges that lead to higher ROI.
Better still—the more people who attend UX writing and content design training, including marketers, product managers, and developers—the more you’ll begin to see collaboration across department lines.
One of the biggest challenges product teams face is a lack of consistency. Without a set of guidelines, content decisions are made intuitively by whoever is writing—whether it’s a product manager, designer, or even a front-end developer.
That lack of consistency erodes user confidence in your product. The result is that your users spend less time actually using your great features and more time just trying to figure out what you’re trying to say.
That leads to churn, dropoff, and more money and pressure on your support teams.
Creating a baseline for UX writing education in your team means everyone is able to spot potential problems—which means they’re far less likely to reach production.
Onboarding new team members is one of the hardest aspects of hiring, especially if those newer team members are new to content design as a whole.
Aligning your new team members with the same UX writing education means they all start from the same place. Not only does this mean you’re able to get them to write usable UI text sooner, but you’re also able to hire entry-level UX writers and content designers with confidence.
When team members operate from different principles, team cohesion and trust begin to break down. Everyone questions decisions made by others, and unapproved inconsistencies are more likely to appear in software.
But by aligning your team with UX writing principles, team members will feel empowered—especially those who aren’t full-time UX writers or content designers. Training developers, marketing team members, product managers, and other professionals in UX writing gives everyone new skills and abilities.
As the Xello content team experienced a period of rapid growth, they quickly realized the need for establishing a shared understanding of UX principles and speaking the same content design language.
Craig Bell, the Director of Content at Xello, decided to choose the UX Content Collective to narrow the skills gap.
“It just seemed like a good idea to find a program that would provide the same sort of foundational understanding of UX and how it applies to writing to the whole team and also so that we can have a shared language.”
Team members are now able to better communicate and explain their writing choices, making the decision-making process efficient. The shared understanding of UX principles has also led to more effective collaboration and a higher-quality user experience for Xello’s clients. Read the full case study.
If you’re ready to give your team skills to succeed, we’re here to help. Continue learning about how we can help, or get in touch via the form below.
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