When it comes to maintaining a productive, creatively fulfilling life, the simple answers are terribly alluring. I’ve swooned to the siren songs of bucking up and toughening up and not giving a fuck and pulling on my bootstraps just a little bit harder. But like the Sirens themselves, those songs are just myths. What I’ve…
Category: Blog Posts
Fresh ideas about craft, clarity, creativity, and personal growth, as well as updates on my projects, media recommendations, and links to all the weird and delightful things I find on the internet.
It’s all made up, and that’s okay
Is content strategy … real? Product strategy? UX strategy? Customer experience? What about content design? Information architecture? Experience architecture? The answer to any of these, depending on my mood, is either yes, no, or who cares. Mostly, and most importantly, it’s “Who cares?”. Arguments about what “does and doesn’t exist” in design land to be…
Two product culture weaknesses that can kill your experience
When the overall quality of a digital experience feels low, but I can’t quite put my finger on it, I’ve found that it often stems from one of two secret weaknesses that plague many product teams: lack of confidence and lack of trust. Lack of confidence The kind of confidence I’m talking about is an…
Ask Scott: Can we let engineers and other non-experts write copy if we haven’t trained them?
We often have the issue that everyone thinks they can write, and our suggestions [as UX writers] are challenged to the end. We, on the other hand, would never challenge engineering decisions.
Scott’s Upcoming Events 2022
It seems it’s going to be a very busy year for me! I left my job as a Staff Content Strategist at Mailchimp at the end of January without much of a plan, other than to spend less time on Zoom calls and more time working on whatever the heck I want. It’s been a…
Writing Rules Are Made to Be Chosen
Wanting to know “the rules” is a very natural impulse when it comes to writing. Learning and following the rules – of spelling, of grammar and usage, of how term papers are supposed to be formatted – was part and parcel of how most of us learned to write. This perspective can be detrimental when…
Hire Product People Who Already Understand Content
This article originally appeared in Issue 050 of UX Writing Events. For some reason (tequila, mostly) I vented a bit of frustration yesterday afternoon with the way content work is often viewed in product land. This tweet seemed to resonate the most with folks: Imagine how much productivity you could unlock by hiring product leadership who already understand…
If the job is more than writing, why does your interview process focus on writing?
Content design is more than writing. Please send us your writing samples. Content design is more than writing. Please take this UX writing test. Content design is more than writing. Take ten minutes to review this and then provide feedback on the writing. Come on now. Do I even have to explain myself here? Bringing…
Two attributes that shape every content role
A version of this originally appeared in Issue 043 of my UX Writing Events newsletter. For a joint meetup of Content Marketing Atlanta and IxDA Atlanta earlier this year, the top question for me from both groups was some version of: “What is up with all of these different content roles?” To illustrate my take…
Fighting Feature Names
You don’t need Proper Nouns to refer to features consistently.