How to Bring UX Thinking Into Your Writing

Technology and writing sometimes feel like separate islands. As writers, we usually just want the easiest, fastest tools to help our writing process. It sometimes takes a lot of prompting to get us to try new tools, even if they’re recommended by prolific writers.

Since a lot of us have that mindset, it’s easy to ignore things being talked about in the tech sphere like UX. Don’t let the X fool you — it’s really an E.

What exactly is user experience?

Don Norman, who used to work with Apple, was the person who coined the term “user experience.” It’s all about making sure that users have a pleasant and smooth experience navigating your website, product, content, and so on.

Words like “company” and “end-user” all sound complicated and far off from the world of writers and readers, but there’s more connection than you might expect. If you want to monetize your writing, whether that’s through blogs or a book release, you are creating an interaction with your prospective reader. You are, in essence, becoming a one-person company.

Here’s a more formal definition of UX, if you’re very new to the idea and have absolutely no idea how it might correlate to your writing.

UX is "the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.”

UX is almost like feng-shui. It’s all about organizing things in a way that will help the user and make sense to the user. This is essentially exactly what we do as writers for our readers. It’s the same exact steps and considerations, just applied to different media.

How often do you think about your reader?

I think it’s exciting to think about UX and start thinking about the reader experience. We often get swept away with our ideas and end up so focused on what we want to write that we forget about who we’re writing for.

You need to know your audience to write a book, but that principle isn’t enough to craft something that readers will truly love. You need to keep thinking about your reader beyond the initial planning process.

Whether you’re writing long-form content or a novel, you need to stop and think about your reader regularly. If it isn’t yet part of your writing process, add this in.

You have your unique reasons and motivations for writing, but at the end of the day, you’re never writing only for yourself. You’re also writing for your readers.

Will your finished story make sense to your reader?

Everything makes sense in your head, but is that going to translate seamlessly?

It might not happen as smoothly as you hope it will. But that’s okay; if you take the time to look at things from your reader’s perspective, you might just realize that certain things are unclear.

Whether you’re trying to convey your protagonist’s inner motivations in a work of fiction or trying to persuade the reader of long-form content, the finished composition needs to make sense. If your work follows a logical sequence of events and develops cohesively, you should be fine.

UX is all about making sure your reader can find what they want quickly, easily, and in an enjoyable way. Your writing should be enjoyable to read, or if you’re writing about more somber topics, clear enough that the reader can appreciate the spectrum of emotions and absorb all the information. No matter what you write, the most basic UX principles apply.

Let those ideas of UX help you write clearly and in a straight-forward manner.

You can still be poetic and creative with your language, but remember to make sure every paragraph still makes sense. It’s tempting to use those twenty fancy, uncommon words you learned from the thesaurus, but using overly-complicated language without good reason will just confuse the reader.

If you’re ready to start thinking about your reader more but aren’t sure how, then it’s time for age-old editing advice. Distance yourself from your writing for a few days. Go back to it and get a little closer to reading from a stranger’s shoes.

Ask yourself; what will your reader leave with at the end?

Are they leaving with some kind of usable advice? Are they sufficiently entertained at the end?

This might sound like it’s more for long-form content writers rather than fiction writers, but it really applies to all populations of writers. Even poets can benefit from asking themselves this question. No matter what kind of content someone is reading, they want to leave feeling like they were enriched by that work.

We’re all short on time, both you as the writer and your reader as a content consumer. We want to get in, get out, and feel fulfilled at the end.

Readers are reading your work because they want something: to learn, to be uplifted, or to be entertained.

All of these reasons are perfectly valid; if your main goal is to entertain, you want to do your best to make sure that your reader leaves feeling entertained.

If you want to teach your reader something⁠ — and again, you can teach someone through an article, through a novel, a poem, or any other kind of writing⁠ — then make sure those lessons come through. UX is all about clarity and usability. A piece of writing should also be clear and readable.

Whenever you make a major decision, pause and think about your reader.

Something they heavily emphasize in the world of UX is that you are not your user. The same is precisely true for writers — you are not your reader. You have different expertise, a different story, and a different perspective than your reader does.

I work in instructional design and communications when I’m not writing and one of the trials I run into most with creating designs is that I can make something that looks really cool, but when it goes in front of a user, they might not know what to do. It’s important to be clear, be concise, and make big design decisions with the user in mind.

It’s absolutely true for writing as well.

It’s easy to get lost in the creative process and your creative vision for a piece.

You’ve got to stop and think about your reader sometimes. How will they react to this? Will this make sense?

I’m far from being an expert on UX, but the ideas behind this golden principle translate over to writing so seamlessly. I went to a training seminar on UX principles for web design today and realized instantaneously how I could apply so many of the best practices I learned to my writing as well as my web design choices.

Ask yourself questions as you write. Pause, be thoughtful, and put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

“What will the reader experience be like if I do this?”