About Scott Kubie
Scott Kubie is lead content strategist at Brain Traffic and the author of Writing for Designers. He's an energetic speaker and inventive, systems-minded designer who loves to empower audiences with whiteboard-friendly frameworks for approaching problems in new ways. Scott lives in Minneapolis and enjoys running, biking, and playing guitar.
Talk
How to Get the Writing Done
From product documentation to menu labels to onboarding flows, writing for apps and the web can feel challenging—even insurmountable.
Search “writing for the web” and you'll find scores of articles echoing the same old advice: clear headlines, scannable text, plain language, benefits over features. Good stuff, but it’s all about what to write … how, exactly, are design teams supposed to produce that writing?
Scott will show you how. This session covers how to properly scope our writing assignments, build efficient writing workflows, and deploy better methods for productive editing, collaboration, version control, and delivery. Stop struggling with writing. Learn how to help your UX team get the writing done.
Workshop
Writing for Designers
Words are one of the most powerful and flexible design materials available. The only way to get words is by writing them – and that's where it can all go wrong. Call it UX writing, interface writing, or simply design, every word in our experiences represents a design decision. It's time to embrace that.
Whether you're looking to move into UX writing or simply hone your own design writing skills, this workshop will empower you to get organized, get going, and get the writing done on your design projects.
Over the course of the day, you'll learn to:
- Identify types of UX content, and apply key considerations in writing each
- Scope and articulate writing assignments in the context of a larger design project
- Describe the roles and responsibilities of a design writer
- Plan, execute, and improve writing workflows for you and your team
- Identify valuable inputs that make the writing work easier
- Apply editing lenses and other tools to improve your writing
- Solicit and manage feedback (and get that final approval!)
This is a workshop about how. It's focused on tools, workflows, methods, and principles that help you get the writing done on design projects. This is not a writing workshop. We will not be writing or critiquing interface copy. This is about purpose, planning, and people. It's aimed at designers and other UXers who need more reliable methods and approaches for dealing with content of all kinds on their projects.
Participants do not need to provide any materials, but you may bring a tablet or laptop if you prefer typing over handwriting on worksheets for some of the exercises.