Write for your audience
Know thy audience
Who are you writing for? The style of writing you use may differ depending on your target audience. It may be appropriate to use more formal writing styles when you’re writing for expert audiences like academics and researchers compared to writing for an undergraduate audience. That being said, writing for novice audiences will almost always benefit everyone, as plain, simple language is easier to digest.
Empathise
Empathise with your users. Don’t assume you know what they need or want to know. Take advantage of any UX research already conducted by your division or institution if available. Some useful activities to help with your problem identification include:
- Conducting an empathy mapping session
- Interviewing your users to better understand their pain points
- Diving into the qualitative and quantitative data you have access to
Define and ideate
Having now completed your research phase, don’t be tempted to jump straight into problem solving mode!
- Writing a purpose statement, which can also help you ensure your content achieves what you set out to achieve.
- Consider any user personas you may have access to
- Ideate viable solutions
Get to writing
There are a few things to consider when you’re getting ready to write your content:
- Which platform should you use? Consider the user experience as a whole; it can be very disjointed moving from one website to another, to yet another, especially if they behave or are styled differently.
- Avoiding jargon and complicated language. Simple writing helps everyone, including people with English as a second language, aging users, people with cognitive disorders, as well as your run-of-the-mill stressed out, time-poor students.
- Structure your writing with clear and logical headings, and use formatting like bullet lists for improved scannability.
- Use tools like Hemingway or ask your colleagues to review your writing to ensure it’s clear and concise.
Validate
Seek feedback from users if you can. You can ask the DX team to help, or volunteer to tag along to an Experience Lab session (previously called the UX Café) to chat with students directly.
As a reminder, quantitative data such as pageview analytics can be great, but sometimes need to be taken with a grain of salt. High pageviews can mean awesome, high-use content, but it could also mean people visit your content with high expectations, only to quickly leave your site again when the content isn’t what they expected.
And finally, once you’ve written amazing content, DON’T FORGET ABOUT IT! Consider scheduling a semi-regular review (like once a trimester, or once a year) to ensure your awesome content stays awesome, accurate and free from errors and broken links.
This post was authored by Rachael Wilson.
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