“[I]f seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can’t be the whole story. I didn’t always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.”
David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable
Getting ready to ask for a raise or promotion in a UX content role
A year or so ago, I had a coaching call with a junior UX writer who was interested in getting a promotion and/or getting a raise in their current role … and perhaps feeling a bit conflated on whether and how those two ideas are connected, or if they should be connected, or … well, … Read more
The value of content design is built-in and self-evident. (the brick analogy)
Let’s imagine something together: Your digital product company has decided to build a new headquarters. The design of the building calls for a brick exterior. (Great choice, by the way.) Do you imagine you will hire bricklayers to lay those brick? Why bother, right? Who needs ’em? Everyone knows how blocks work. Stack stack stack. … Read more
Writing ain’t religion
Choose a writing method that works for your team, content, and audience. Writing ain’t religion, friends. It’s okay to attend more than one church. Let’s take content design, for instance. Content design is generally my top choice when: A) writing content that has to support as broad of an audience as possible, and/orB) making content … Read more
It’s a website, not a carnival.
If you’re a UX writer, content designer, or similar, you need to learn to resist the pressure to be clever, to be funny, to be creative, to “make it pop”, to “give it personality” — especially if you’re not sure that it’s appropriate for the experience. (It’s probably not.)
The Value of Slowthinking (Who doesn’t want to wear the ribbon?)
I’ve learned not to trust what I think I think, what I think I believe, what I think the answer is, right in the moment.
Three Years + 125 Issues of UX Writing & Content Events
This originally appeared as Issue No. 125 of the Content.Events weekly newsletter on April 24, 2023. It’s our anniversary, or thereabouts. It’s okay, I didn’t get you anything either. I just wanted to mark the occasion. The first issue of the UX Writing Events newsletter — the original banner of this publication — went out … Read more
David Rakoff on writing
Writing for Designers in Tokyo
I had the great pleasure of visiting Tokyo recently, to speak at the long-running, COVID-interrupted UX Days event. From my perspective it was over 3 years in the making, from the initial invitation to actually being able to attend. Wild. The trip was a lot of firsts for me; my first time in Japan, my first … Read more
What the heck is content ecosystem mapping?
Good question. To fully answer it, we have to explore a few related, but distinct, terms: Content ecosystem mapping is a sensemaking activity for digital strategy. Digital strategy projects could include: and so on. In a design and strategy context, sensemaking is something we do in order to better understand an environment, problem, or situation. … Read more