Overview: Writing content

A while back, in the early days of our design system, we had a ticket for a component sitting in our backlog, with the title “Alert.” My initial reaction was “Oh yeah, a colored box with a little icon to the left of it and some text, easy.” Oh dear reader, how naive I was…

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.