Ask the Experts: Kickstarting Your UX Writing Career

awesome so i see that we are now live and just want to make sure hello everyone welcome good afternoon good evening or morning depending on where you're tuning in from um we'll give everyone just a couple of seconds to trickle in i just want to make sure that we have everyone in here and you can see my screen and so today we will be covering kick starting your ux writing career and so if that's what you sign up for you are in the right place we are excited to see over 400 people registered which is great we received 75 plus questions and people tuning in from 50 plus countries so if you could drop a chat and let us know where you're tuning in from and right now the chat is blowing up so we got washington dc canada berlin maine atlanta egypt i can't keep up um hello everyone thank you so much for spending your day with us yeah or the hour um and so i am modern moderating today's q a from austin texas and then we have bobby in california and patrick in australia and so we will get everything going and so just so everyone is aware we will be recording this session so you can watch it later share it with a friend and we want to make sure that we capture all of your questions and so i know the chat can get kind of noisy so if you want to put anything in the q a function we'll make sure to moderate those and then we'll also download them so that later we can cover off on any of your questions we will publish this video on youtube after so again you can watch it and we will be sharing an email recap so feel free to pay attention take notes whatever works for you awesome so today we are joined by bobby and patrick the founders of ux writers collective um and so they are going to be answering all of your burning career questions and we received a ton so obviously if we don't get to all of them we will make sure we address them at a later date so bobby is the former head of ux content strategy for google payments and google assistant and a former design and content senior manager for quickbooks and then we have patrick a former lead digital copywriter for myob and the host of writers of silicon valley podcast and co-founder of usux raiders collective as well so we will keep going so before we dive in i just wanted to give everyone just a quick course overview for those of you who are interested in getting certified and pursuing ux writing as a full-time career and so ux writing fundamentals is what we consider our core certification and so this is perfect for people who are looking for that strong foundation to really give them the confidence and the certification to make ux writing your full-time career and then we're really excited about a new course coming soon for technical writers who want to um hone in on ux writing and um you know get those best practices for their work as well so keep your eyes peeled for a new course ux writing for tech writers and then the remainder of our courses are skills-based courses so we have content research and testing chatbot writing and design cx writing for marketing as well as our microcopy course which is an introduction to microcopy great so like i mentioned you guys all had amazing questions we just want to like make sure we can address all of them and so today we will be focusing on these four main areas which are skills qualifications the job search portfolio 101 and career development so if we don't get to your question today we will make sure we address it in a follow-up webinar or a blog post so just know that we really value all of your questions and with that we will start with the first category so skills and qualifications what skills should ux writers have uh to begin with in this first one i believe bobby you will kick us off hello hello everyone i'm so happy you're all here this is so fun um okay so what skills should you x writers have we have hard skills you need to be a good writer you've got to know your spelling mechanics and grammar for whatever language you are writing in um our courses are offered in english we're going to launch we're going to launch a few in spanish in the next year but we'll see when that happens so if you're writing in english in spanish in french whatever your language is man you better have those writing skills solidly handled spelling mechanics and grammar you need to be highly efficient at communication so in other words you need to know how to shorten things to make them easier to understand briefer succinct concise one of the things you'll hear ux writers say is that you don't want to make things so short that they no longer make sense so you're going to want to be familiar with that balance between concision and context so make sure you never sacrifice context for brevity make sure everything makes sense to your users you want to have curiosity and empathy for people and maybe that should have gone under soft skills now that i'm looking at it but one of the prerequisites for ux writing is you need to have a lot of compassion and empathy for your users as they're trying to get through a task you really do want to know how they're feeling and meet them there help them to get to the next task help them complete steps you're really trying to predict all the time what they're trying to get done and how you can help them at every little step another good skill is user experience design for some very specific uh elements of software and that would be task instructions dialogues error messages customer facing emails those could be marketing or transactional emails you'll want to know how to write for forms so you'll want to know how what's the difference between a form label and hint text that goes inside of a field and then what about a an error that also goes along with that form so for forms there's some complicated writing in there it all looks simple hopefully when you're a user but it takes a lot of work to get those things right you'll also need to know how to write a tool tip it's got to be short and it's got to be informative when do you add a tool tip and when don't use so those are kind of you know skills of their own how to write a notification notification should always be short and front loaded so that if you're only seeing the first five words on your mobile device those five words have meaning so you'll know whether to click through or not and you'll need to know how to write for onboarding flows so tour screens and welcome to our software here are a bunch of empty states and you'll have to be able to guide users on how to get those empty states filled on the soft skills side a ux writer is very much a chameleon you're going to go out and work with lots of people from across the company those will be product managers developers designers marketers support people so um even though a lot of writers are very introverted that's okay but you want to be brave enough to go out and make connections with all these other people and make sure you pull in all of their good um advice for you about what you're writing and that you're going to be able to take in what they've offered you as feedback synthesize it and make a decision about what's right to include in your text and what to let go an important soft skill is also you need to be able to persuade others to have empathy and to build connection um some some people approach ux writing with a very um just sort of follow the rules get it done get them through the flows and they're sort of a lack of empathy or relationship building so one of the biggest things that user experience writers do is they're going to build connections and and show a lot of empathy for our users and be able to persuade other people on your design team and on your development team that that's important that's the quick answer yeah oh great um patrick do you have anything you want to add or do you think that kind of comes off i think that's all great um i do apologize my internet cut out for about 30 seconds so uh bobby if you address what i'm about to say i'm i'm sorry but i'll just repeat it i think uh another great skill to have alongside all of these great ones is the ability to harness data and the ability to understand data in order to support an argument um i've seen a lot of ux writers argue for or maybe not argue but try and uh persuade a team uh to make a particular change or in a string but they don't necessarily have the data backing up that that decision so the ability to use all different types of data and information in order to to make their point and then later on prove the results of their work as well yeah no that's super super important all right let's make sure i can move along great so when hiring what kind of background or experience do manage managers look for and this one is me again so i'll hop right in um when i was a hiring manager at google intuit startups what i needed to know about candidates was what was their passion why were they interested in the role how could their passion help to support their learning and their drive to do really good work so it's just important that you are able to express that in interviews in your portfolio then i'd want to know do you know the basic rules and best practices so we just went over a little list of like how to write for all those ui components um you will need to know how to write an error message or what's the best way to put one line of instruction below a heading in a ui in a mobile screen for example um i'd want to know that you're secure and knowledgeable enough to work independently and what we mean by that is you can almost say that someone's level when they come in in their entry level they'll need some hand holding that's totally normal and good as you move up to mid less hand holding you'll be able to go out to other teams and you'll be able to make those connections and get that work done without the help of your manager and then eventually when you're senior or a lead you're doing the hand holding so that's an important aspect for deciding what level you're at when you're applying for a role are you able to guide other team members to help them understand what's important about ux writing and maybe what to let go so an example there might be that we occasionally break grammar rules for example we often use the pronoun they to refer to a single person because it's gender neutral every once in a while you'll find somebody in your team or in your company who's very persnickety about grammar rules um funny enough i found that people who use the queen's english are most fussy about these things but you'll have to sort of be able to persuade people that they're you know sometimes breaking the rules is all right um and then an important aspect is do you learn quickly and can you flex when priorities change and this is sort of the nature of all high-tech jobs you've got to sort of be fast learning and fast-moving and those are just important aspects of the role great no that's a great answer awesome so we will move on to the next question if my cursor will cooperate so do i need a certification will my portfolio be sufficient enough to land a job and patrick this one is for you this one's for me so the the short answer is no you don't need a certification in order to get a job and yes your portfolio can be enough but a certification can definitely help and the reason why a certification will help is that it will teach you the skills that bobby just described in the previous answer so for instance a certification can help you reach a basic level of competency so learning how to write for various different components different states and so on uh taking part in the certification will also add a project to your portfolio depending on what certification you do so again it's really important that when you apply for a job that you actually have material that you can show the hiring manager and so taking part in the certification is not necessarily about the certification itself it's about what you produce in that certification that you can show to a hiring manager and again going back to what bobby said before a certification can help you learn knowledge in key areas so what is the role of the ux writer in the design team not only that but what is the role of everyone else in the design team and the company who are you going to encounter for instance you know you're working with the product manager you need to understand their role you need to understand what their needs are what they expect from you and also what you expect from them you need to understand what is the developer's role in the design team how does a ux writer and a developer work together will they ever work together these are the types of things that a certification course can teach you uh if you're new to the field and you don't necessarily have have that experience but ultimately your portfol your portfolio will be the the deciding factor and when you're when you're taking part in the certification the idea should be that you're creating something that you can add to your portfolio so that you can show a hiring manager i've done this i've i've shown this level of competency and i'm i'm able to to do the work bobby is there anything you might add to that just a quick answer to a chat question um yes it's very beneficial if you've worked as a ux designer before because any experience with ux is super valuable any experience with software design or software development is super valuable yeah absolutely and we'll get to the other questions in just a minute here yes awesome sorry my for some reason my mouse keeps getting frozen awesome so what can we do outside of our jobs to stand out in the field to managers and recruiters okay so here's a wall of text for you guys but i had a lot of suggestions here um okay so what what's the point of standing out right why do we want to stand out in the field it's showing that you have a passion for the practice and the discipline and that's important things you can do to show that you are an involved active participant in learning ux writing are volunteering at conferences so um confab button um ux design conferences try to find the ones that are most legitimate and have the how do i say this the most vetted panel of speakers and that's sort of how you know like a good conference from a not great conference or you know something like that um you can start a ux writing meetup in your city or you can attend your local meetup so that's a good way to just sort of uh make connections with other people get involved you can write blog posts for ux writer's collective yay send us your proposals we want to hear them send that to blog at uxwc or excuse me i'm sorry blog uxfriarscollective.com um you can also write for other prominent design outlets on medium for example so there's ux collective which is very similar to our name as just an example be sure that you know your interaction design and your visual design so if i look at a ux writer's resume and i see that they have taken a course in visual designer or interaction design i'm going to say that person is very interested in participating in the design process and is proving that by studying up on the side with interaction design ux designer visual design other pluses are to learn design tools the most prominent tools right now are sketch figma adobe xd miro patrick you probably can reel off a couple more when you take the ux writing fundamentals course and i hope you all will our final is is a figma project so that's great because you'll learn how to handle text in figma and you'll get a real taste of what it's like to work on a design team on an actual software flow you can always learn html and css so those are kind of the basics for any kind of presentation in web apps or mobile apps is to understand html and css that will just give you a good solid foundation and background in almost any other tool yes html and css are enough without javascript you do not need to know javascript um that's a pretty arcane whoops katie we just lost that sorry we're back that's okay don't check your mail oh no for some reason the chat function keeps like going on to different browsers so i'm following along sorry y'all got you um the other the other tip i have for how to stand out is to specialize so you can pick an area of ux writing that you think are um that you think is extra valuable so if you can learn about accessibility you can learn translation and localization you can learn about info architecture artificial intelligence and machine learning in relation to ux and software design virtual reality augmented reality conversation design or you might have a specialization in ux for hardware devices like talking cars smart watches or even smart tvs for information architecture that really is about when you are developing a whole new app or website how is the user going to navigate so in other words what are those top menu choices and what's most important to put there and what logically makes sense below each of those top choices so that's a little very brief discussion of what information architecture means ux writers are typically responsible for creating product voice and tone the product voice and tone generally it ladders up to the brand voice and tone so i'm trying to answer some quick chat questions yeah we've got a lot of great questions coming through yep awesome so moving along now we're going to focus on the job search and we'll definitely cover more portfolio things in a few so if there aren't a lot of entry-level openings is it okay for a newbie to apply for jobs asking for two plus years experience patrick i think this is for you this is me so uh the answer is yes um and in fact uh it's okay to apply for any job you know there are no rules that say you can or can't apply for a specific job um but what you need to really be uh be mindful of is you need to demonstrate that you have the competency in order to do the job that's what the hiring manager really cares about a lot of the time when a job ad says we want two years of experience or five years of experience or ten years of experience that's really just shorthand to try and find candidates who have a specific skill level so if you're looking at a job ad and they say we want someone with two years of experience what you really need to do is read the rest of the job ad and find exactly what they're looking for and then demonstrate that you can do those things so for instance you might see a job ad that says we want a ux writer with a few years of experience and we really want someone who has uh written for error states perhaps that's the specific problem they're trying to fix well then you would need to gear your portfolio and the work that you've done to show that you can do that that's really what people are looking for so when you see that job ad and you think okay well i don't have enough experience but they're asking for two years you really need to demonstrate the skills and projects that show that experience and then prove how you're able to do the job and then just do a little mind experiment think about if you were in this position as a hiring manager and you're asking for someone with two years of experience but someone who doesn't have that experience applies for the job what questions would you ask how would you interre maybe not interrogate that person but what would you ask that person to make sure that they have the skills in order to do the job and then preemptively answer those in your application and in your portfolio so the short answer is that yes you can absolutely apply for that job if you don't necessarily have the uh experience or the formal experience but you can still uh do a lot of things to to make you stand out for that role yeah great bobby is there anything else you want to add or any questions in the chat that feel relevant to this topic i'm just trying to take a quick scan i think the next couple slides will address some of the stuff that's coming up so we'll just yeah awesome so what is the average annual salary for an entry-level ux writer compared to an experienced ux writer so this is me uh so a couple of years ago we conducted a salary survey at the ux writers collective and we asked for a whole bunch of responses and in fact you can uh read the full results of that survey on our website so i would encourage you to to check that out on that blog for some more information um but according to the the salary survey uh in the united states primarily and so i'm going to adjust my answer to the united states because that's where we recorded the most number of responses the average is 126 000 now when it comes to experience for about one to three years of experience men and women were ninety thousand dollars and ninety four thousand dollars respectively now for people who have over ten years of experience uh for men was a hundred ninety one thousand dollars and women 143 000 dollars that's quite a discrepancy there um so uh i'd really encourage you to use that information as much as possible i would caveat that the number of when we conducted this survey uh it is a relatively small sample size so it's important to just have that information at hand but this is just a good starting point to understand okay what's possible and what is the difference between uh between those two those two levels of experience um bobby you might want to uh to add something here because you know as as you would know in uh in california especially there are various different ways that a salary or total compensation can be packaged together so yeah you may have something to add yeah so um one of the things to bear in mind is that there when you're working for software companies you'll often have a range of pay types that make up your total compensation so there's your salary there's your bonus that you might be eligible for there's um your the sum total of your benefits like your health and you know life insurance benefits dental visual uh vision insurance and then there's also equity so you might get stock the one thing that i would say is that we didn't clarify when we asked this question which one of those we meant and so some people may have answered with respect to their total compensation and some may have answered based on a salary so there's a there's a little bit of squishiness in here um i would say that if you are a woman and i would bet you about 70 percent of you are women in this in this field um please please bear in mind that women are less comfortable asking for manager and leadership roles often because we're juggling family needs etc etc and i'm talking from experience so um i would encourage all women and i really mean this to go for those leadership roles and to understand that your style of managing is just as interesting and compelling and valuable and cool as any man's would be so just get in there and and raise your hand for those leadership roles let's do it ladies yeah awesome and so now we're going to segue into portfolio which i know we have a ton of questions kind of trickling in on that as well so we'll get started with this one so what are the key components of a great portfolio should you go in depth maybe on one sort of case study or show a variety of examples uh oh i think this is me yeah bobby thank you yeah yeah so um a lot of these questions we've we've already covered um in fact i don't know that this is the right i don't know that i put the right answer in here for this question um your examples should show that you have covered the needs of the ux writing role so patrick mentioned go look at that job description break it down what do they need in that role and is your portfolio showing specifically that you can do that work so um i mentioned before that a portfolio should express your passion and your interest in the role it should tell us like why are you here why are you sitting in this room with me or on a zoom call with me um why are you interviewing for this job what drives you um and you may have come from an adjacent role so you may have come from a role where you're doing work that's similar or you're writing but you're not a ux writer or you're not on a design team um and that is perfectly okay what you'll want to do is pull from that work to find as many examples as you can of customer facing writing that lands in the ux writing landscape if that makes sense so if you've ever written error messages they're totally relevant put them in your portfolio if you've written emails where you need to persuade or inform put them in your portfolio so um that's kind of my uh yeah advice there i think i covered that one patrick you might want to jump in yeah i think you know one of the best uh pieces of advice i received about writing a portfolio is that you may or may not be familiar with the uh the double diamond ux process and i would encourage you to google it and check it out it's basically the describing the process that a user experience project should go through it's very helpful to write a case study that follows that same structure which is you start at trying to research the problem and research you know what's going on then you come to a point where you really define the problem so what is it that you're trying to solve then you go into the next part which is ideating coming up with various different solutions and then prototyping and testing and then finally results so you really check out uh that the double diamond uh process and it's uh it's just a great way to keep your case study really structured because i know that if you don't have a structure to your case study you can be like oh and we did this oh and we did that and we did this too and this was really cool and it can be a little bit unstructured whereas i can tell you when i've read portfolios as a hiring manager before i really want to see like what was it that you were trying to accomplish you know what solutions did you try and also um bobby you can probably i think you'll probably agree with this what did you get wrong like did you try something and it didn't work and what did you learn from that and then how did you implement that learning into your final result uh you know a case study and a portfolio is really about demonstrating how do you think how do you respond to failure or unexpected results how are you resilient enough to then take that information implement it into your solution and then keep going forward we had a question to an add-on are pdf portfolios okay or is a website the best way to do it as a hiring manager in the past i will tell you that i am biased towards people who put their portfolios online and the reason is that if i know you've put your portfolio online it tells me a lot it tells me you're not afraid of doing that work to figure out a design tool you're not afraid of trying to use a tool like wix or squarespace if you can figure out that software it means you can write for the software that i need you to write for pdf portfolios are okay and even preferred in certain situations so if your online portfolio is a general portfolio that addresses your ux writing skills but you're applying for a job that has very specific requests to find out about your writing you may need to add a pdf component with specific examples that that company has requested so you've got to be a little bit flexible on your portfolio and making sure that you're covering all the bases that that company needs to see so that can be a challenge but um yeah bobby i we've got a question here that i find really interesting which is uh if you have relevant work but that's under an nda how do you go about putting that in your portfolio and showing a prospective employer this is from natalie yeah ow ow the pain of that the pain it hurts i have to tell you guys i left google and when you leave google you can take nothing with you and it just was so painful because i'd done such great stuff there with frameworks and tools and examples so what do you do in that situation um here's my advice number one always stash away bits of your work and keep them in a private file so that even if you don't show those screens in your portfolio you can at least speak to them in an interview and you'll remember the work that you did um another piece of advice there is if you stash away your work and it and then later that work is public facing any public-facing work you are allowed to talk about so even if you've signed an nda if you've worked on a software or a site or a mobile app and if that is released to the public you can talk about that work so just keep that in mind stash away those examples you might be stashing for two years before it's time to go job hunting but you'll have your file with all of your um prompts and screen captures to help you yeah bobby one thing i might add to that just quickly is that uh you should really try and understand what is it that the nda applies to because it may be that your employer is only interested in making sure that the results like specific results are kept private but they don't necessarily care if you want to show other aspects of the work so talk to whoever's in charge at your company and just be really clear about what is it that they want to keep confidential and what is it that they're allowed to share and you know you may find yourself in a situation where you're able to um be able to share more than you would thought so yeah just be really clear about what it is they're wanting you can also be a tiny bit back door about it so you can say to your interviewer this is proprietary work i'm showing you once you know please don't share don't take screen captures don't quote this if you have to do that you you sort of can it's it's an unofficial way that people approach that problem um but you didn't hear that from me awesome well we're gonna carry along with some more portfolio questions so how do you go about creating a portfolio if you don't have direct ux writing work work work experience which i think we covered a little bit in the last section um but we'll definitely get into more tangibles here okay so um your if you've ever seen a terrible example of ui that's out in the world um katie is awesome she calls this in the wild every day he's got some amazing examples in the slack mentor channel for ux writer's collective um so if you rewrite those examples and you put them in a portfolio that is fair game you just need to be able to articulate your rationale talk about what you found bad about the example and how you improved it and what principles or best practices you relied on to guide you so that would be how you would take a bad example recreate it and articulate why you made the changes that you did if you take a course that offers a portfolio project like we do you're you're golden um that's a great example to put in your portfolio um if you have worked in an adjacent job we talked about this a little bit if you've written emails if you've written ctas if you've written error messages put it all in there that's all related you can do pro bono projects for friends and you can also check volunteer non-profit sites like catchafire.org and you can volunteer to work for free for non-profits so win-win for everybody you come out with examples and they come out with somebody um having helped their non-profit so all good yeah and i i'll add that um i actually volunteered through ketchup fire and i found it to be a great resource you can sign up for an hour project a week project whatever your time allows so it's a really great way to give back and then in exchange you get that work for your portfolio um we actually had a good question about so let's say you do decide to find these micro copy moments in the wild and help rewrite them is it enough to just kind of include these quick bites or should it be part of a larger story how do you frame that content that you're rewriting yeah i would say small examples are very valuable for the very reason that a lot of times entry-level writers are writing those teeny little micro copy instances and they still need to be deeply understood from a user's perspective so even if you are showing tiny examples that's great talk about why it mattered talk about how it mattered to the rest of the flow around it so that you do articulate the fact that you understand how that little piece plays into the overall flow of that user experience that'll be important great so we also saw this in the chat let's say you don't have strong coding or design experience or are just learning how can you kind of make your portfolio pop yeah so the first thing i'd say about this question is that um the most important part of your portfolio is showing your thinking so you shouldn't necessarily think that you need to have some amazing looking portfolio otherwise you're not going to stand out uh i can say as you know someone who's hired in the past like i don't care if a portfolio is just very basic but if it has the right answers and the right material and is demonstrating that person knows what they're doing that's that's going to be most important that being said it's always great to show off your skills and to and to make your portfolio look really awesome so there are things that you could do i would experiment with no code sites like squarespace or wix both of those uh fantastic and also because they are component based they're really going to show off your ability your content design abilities so how are you laying out the content how are you structuring it um you know we talked about information architecture a little bit before that's a great way to demonstrate that type of skill now that being said you should know some aspects of visual and design work uh when you're when you're when you're creating a portfolio and squarespace or wix make that really easy so at a minimum it needs to look good you know it needs to be structured well really focus on things like color palettes uh making it appear like a like a a cohesive uh project make it look like you've put some intentional thought into how you're designing it you don't want a bunch of different colors and you don't want different fonts you don't want it to be uh you don't want it to look like you just sort of like slapped it together in five minutes you want it to make it look like a hole it doesn't need to be complex it just needs to everything needs to match we talked about this before but structure your case studies and compelling narratives you use subheads to really break apart the different stages of your case studies that just make it makes it really interesting to read and also structured very well and then finally if you have images or sketches or anything that you've created during the design process uh include that in the case study and in your portfolio and use that to break up the information if you have sketches that you've just you know just done with pen and paper take a photo of it keep that and then use that in your case study later on um it's just a really interesting way to see that you've you've done different types of work uh and ultimately at the end of the day uh it's the it's the strength of those case studies that are really going to to make you stand out but those are some ways you can you can make it pop without necessarily uh going full boring figma or sketch great um quick addition katie yeah go for it yeah so um i just realized that one of the things we haven't addressed a lot of people have more a portfolio that serves more than one purpose for example you might be a playwright who is also a ux writer or you might be a ux designer who also can specialize in ux writing depending on the role my advice is always just to make sure that your ux writing section of your portfolio is distinct and and answers the questions that a ux writing hiring manager would have for you so um it's okay to have a portfolio that serves various purposes if you're oh how do i say this politely if you are a book author and your portfolio site looks like that's all you really are passionate about is writing your books and you have a little adjunct part of your portfolio that is about ux writing i would recommend that you do a separate portfolio that showcases your ux writing so um hiring managers will look to make sure that you're not just you know trying to scrape up some paychecks when your passion is actually entirely outside of ux writing or software design great um yeah i think one of the questions in the chat was asking if you have a strong design portfolio should you separate ux writing into a separate portfolio um or should those kind of live together as well i think it's just fine if those live together because they're so closely related um yeah and i would just make sure that you communicate in your portfolio that you know how to handle ux writing specifically and not just visual design or interaction design great so moving on to career development we've kind of talked about this um in some of the other sections but how can you market yourself if you've worked in adjacent roles copywriting journalism or even other technical writing roles okay guys listen up if this is you because this is super super super important a lot of people transition to ux writing from other fields other types of writing and i will tell you right now almost nobody came into ux writing you know two to five years ago with with the ux writing background it didn't exist this is a new discipline what i will say is this do not apologize for your previous experience not being exactly perfect for what those hiring managers are looking for your skills are super super valuable if i'm interviewing a journalist i know that that person knows how to target questions to developers to get the information they need so that their writing is good i know that that journalist knows how to interview a designer and ask the right questions or a product manager or another stakeholder if you're a technical writer it means that you understand the basic needs of users and you can apply those to a new a new uh format basically you're you're taking your tech writing skills and you're applying them to software interfaces that's completely valuable so i would encourage you guys don't feel bad like you don't have the right experience feel good and understand that your experience your past work whether you were a teacher or you know a scientist a researcher whatever you were bring those skills and proudly offer them up in this new role because they're valuable um okay i'm off my soapbox now i would also recommend that you emphasize your capabilities over your experience or your title so you can rewrite your whole resume if you were a marketing copywriter that's great what work did you do in your marketing writing that is very similar or falls into the wheelhouse for ux writing and emphasize that in your resume and in your portfolio in your past positions talk about the impact and the success that you were able to achieve with your writing and it doesn't matter what type of writing that was if you were a support writer and you helped to reduce tickets because you understood what users needed to know in a support or troubleshooting environment that means you were a great ux writer you improved the user experience for those users so just make sure that you're able to speak to your impact in the success of your work whatever it was and if you were involved in any role where you needed to be aware of and take into consideration usability and user-centered writing that's extremely valuable so um just make sure that you're able to speak to those skills great um and somebody asked would social media management could that be considered ux writing experience and i think as a social media manager in a way right you're crafting these experiences whether it's one-to-one communication with people on social you're writing copy um with character restraints um but just curious your thoughts on how that translates to ux writer role well i love that answer katie that was actually perfect so katie is a social media manager who's now working with us and man is she an excellent ux writer like she jammed through our final for fundamentals and just scored you know massively high scores because she's creative she understands what users need in the moment um so yeah just know that those you already know what you're doing you know don't don't apologize for your awesomeness yeah no i appreciate that and yes love that answer awesome and i just wanted to make a note for some reason the q a function is not opening on my screen um so if you are dropping questions in the chat great because that's where i can see them so sorry about that um and we definitely want to get through these last few questions we have about 10 minutes um so this one is is it worth taking a roll tangentially but not directly related to the role you really want to get your foot in the door what do we think yes so here's what i would say about that um if you're if your manager for the company that you are considering is supportive of ux writing or content design in other words if you already know there's a team somewhere or that role exists at that company then yeah go for it because maybe you work six months in an adjacent role but then six months later you raise your hand and say hey i'm you know i took a course i'm certified uh i know what i'm doing let me on your ux writing team and they will so that's awesome totally worth it um if that position offers you the chance to think about user experience writing so customer facing writing yay katie um katie glick says that's what i did yay so uh yeah if you're doing customer facing work and it's somewhere related to user experience design and thinking it's good um also yes if you need paychecks don't kill yourself with like no i won't accept any job that isn't the perfect job make sure you're you know taking care of the basics i don't need to tell you that but i did anyway um and then if the role is too low paid or doesn't help you in developing that narrative that is your path to ux writing then maybe it's not the best choice so in other words do you go to fiverr and do you take on some um seven dollar an hour marketing copywriting jobs if it serves your your narrative and it helps you because you just need some basic practice okay um don't put it on your resume it's probably not going to impress anyone else right so these things are sort of um look for the best experience you can get um and look for that path forward it might not be the perfect path but it's going to get you there eventually and just be patient great yeah and bobby i i'll just add to that you know if you do go into that position and you you see that part uh i'd add that you need to be proactive about that you can't just wait for someone to sort of notice you and say like oh you're really good you should come over here you need to be proactively pursuing how you're going to transition into that next role good stuff so this question i need a ux writing mentor what's the best way to work with one cool so i think the the first thing uh i should answer here is you need to be specific about like why you need a mentor so what are you trying to achieve is it that you really want career guidance and advice is it that you want specific advice in how to improve your ux writing skills what what do you what do you need the reason i say that is because if you approach someone and you ask them to be a mentor they're usually going to be a person with more experience that means they're usually going to be busier they're going to have a lot more responsibility and so it's really going to help them if you are very specific about what you need um if you just go to them and say hey be my mentor please now you do all the work and you you know you put me through like a training program or you know you rely on them to give you advice about you know anything under the sun that's going to be that's going to be more work for them so you just need to be very specific about what it is that you're trying to understand then it's about finding a person who you think might be able to help you and to that i'd say it's really about networking so you need to build relationships and the way you can do that is through joining communities so there are lots of ux writing communities on linkedin the ux writing group uh that that bobby manages that's a great one there's lots of people in there uh the design community on twitter the hashtags ux writing ux writers there's lots of great discussions happening there um there are slap groups like the uxwc ux mentors group uh the content and ux slack channel is a great one there's lots lots of communities everywhere um particularly meetups as you know there's a lot of meetups now there's a big one in san francisco but there are lots of other ux writing and content design slash strategy meetups in cities all over the world so no matter where you are try and find one if you don't have one maybe start one and start gatherings that way and see you know what type of people you can you can meet and then it's really about after you've started establishing relationships with people just reaching out to those people and saying you know hi i'd really love you know i really admire your work i'd love to speak with you for you know 20 or 30 minutes and again this comes back to being specific about what you want so after you've built that relationship you can then say to that person look i'm really looking for a mentor to help me with insert whatever you're looking looking for help with i'm really looking for a mentor to help me with my skills in getting projects across the line inside my organization or i really would love some mentorship and guidance with uh information architecture or you know i'd really like some some i really want to go from like a senior to a lead how did you do that how do i go about doing that um that's how i would go about building that relationship because again the more specific you are the the better it's gonna be no that's great um and i will also add that i recently joined this new platform called lunch club i don't know if anyone's familiar um but it's kind of similar to like virtual networking you get paired with a match each week um i'm not quite sure which countries it's available in but just wanting to plug if anyone is interested in doing that and we are also thinking through how do we scale mentorship within ux writer's collective so definitely more to come there for students and so just want to make sure we only have a couple minutes left and i believe we are done with our kind of scheduled questioning um but definitely want to make sure we can get any outstanding chats answered and what's the best way to describe the accomplishments of your writing experience on your resume if you're coming from a non-ux background so more of a resume related question instead of portfolio what do we think there uh yeah i talked about that a little bit just make sure that you actually use the keywords that you see in the job description so when you're putting together a resume to respond to a role make sure that whatever words they're using um to find you you are using them in your resume to be found yeah and then i see people asking for the links to the slack groups and lunch club i will make sure to send resources in our post webinar recap just for some reason i can't close this browser or else i'm going to lose everyone but i will make sure to send those out and let's see if we have any other last minute questions is there anything you shouldn't say on your resume that's a tough one so um okay so we we covered a couple of things kind of informally don't apologize for adjacent work make sure that you're pulling the best of your past work and your past experience and putting that forward um when you are putting together a resume feel free to go ahead and put ux writer as the title at the top but boy oh boy you better be able to support that farther down so if you have been um what's the difference between a ux writer and a ux copywriter if you are writing copy in a ux environment that's ux writing work so it doesn't really matter what the title is um yeah i think that's probably we'll probably i'd better quit talking this route coming everyone one more minute yes just wanted to say thank you everyone and we will make sure we download all the questions in the chat and then we have all of your questions you submitted ahead of time so we just gotta read through all those and we'll make sure that we follow up with you in another webinar um or on our blog so thank you again um and we will send you a follow-up via email so stay tuned there thanks bobby thanks patrick hi everybody good luck thank you bye oh before we leave lastly all right um if you're still watching and you're interested in getting certified we do have 20 off our fundamentals course with code kickstart20 so um that will be good through the end of the month thank you again thank you everyone

Channel: Admin UXWC

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Id: euegss_H2_k

Length: 60min 54sec (3654 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021