Strategic Writing for UX

Chapter 6. Measuring UX Content Effectiveness

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Measuring UX Content Effectiveness

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

—Peter Drucker, business consultant

When I find an existing screen with UX text that is too complex, too long, or too repetitive, I bring my proposed changes to the product owner.

“How do we know this is worth the effort?” they ask. The product owner is protecting the team’s engineering time and localization cost. To make demands of those resources, I need to make the right argument.

“How are you measuring success?” I ask.

I listen to the explanation of their metric—or their excuse for not having a metric.

The metric is usually a very specific version of “we need more people to do this thing.” Sometimes, that thing is to start doing it, or finish doing it, or to become aware of it. So, I explain where the current UX text slows down the person and frustrates them from continuing. I show them how the changes I propose would make improvements.

I say, “I’m confident these changes would improve your metric.”

This scene was abstracted from more than a hundred conversations in at least five teams I’ve worked with. We reach agreement in principle and then we find when and where in the development schedule to add this work item. I offer to open a work item for engineering, both to be helpful and to keep a record of the task.

The role of the UX writer is to improve the experience by optimizing the UX content. By measuring the improvement UX writing makes ...