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UX Writing
This flexible textbook provides an integrated approach to user experience (UX) writing and
equips students and practitioners with the essential principles and methods to succeed in
writing for UX.
The fundamental goal of UX writing is to produce usable and attractive content that
boosts user engagement and business growth. This book teaches writers how to create
content that helps users perform desired tasks while serving business needs. It is informed
by user-centered design, content strategy, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital marketing
communication methodologies, along with UX-related practices. By combining writing-as-
design and design-as-writing, the book offers a new perspective for technical communication
education where UX design and writing are merged to achieve effective and desirable
outcomes.
Outlining the key principles and theories for writing user-centered content design, this
core textbook is fundamental reading for students and early career practitioners in UX,
technical communication, digital marketing, and other areas of professional writing.
Jason C. K. Tham is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at
Texas Tech University, USA.
Tharon Howard is a Professor of English at Clemson University, USA.
Gustav Verhulsdonck is an Associate Professor of Business Information Systems at Central
Michigan University, USA.

UX Writing
Designing User-Centered Content
Jason C. K. Tham, Tharon Howard, and
Gustav Verhulsdonck

Designed cover image: solvod / © Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Jason C. K. Tham, Tharon Howard, and Gustav Verhulsdonck
The right of Jason C. K. Tham, Tharon Howard, and Gustav Verhulsdonck to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 9781032228389 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032227405 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003274414 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003274414
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

Contents
Foreword xi
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xvii
PART 1
Perspectives 1
1 Introduction to UX Writing 2
Chapter Overview 2
Learning Objectives 2
A Brave New World 2
UX: The Design of Experience 3
The Rise of UX Writing 7
Writing at Multiple Intersections 8
UX Writing Goals 12
UX Writing Technologies: AI, Data Analytics, Oh My! 15
UX Writing Career Facts 17
Conclusion 19
Chapter Checklist 19
Discussion Questions 20
Learning Activity 1 20
Learning Activity 2 21
2 The UX Writing Process 23
Chapter Overview 23
Content as a Product and a Process 23
The UX Writing Taxonomy: Three Continuums 25
Content Lifecycle 28
Major Theories That Inform UX (and) Writing 30
From Design Science to Design Thinking 33
Phase 1: Empathizing with Users and Understanding Their Needs 36
Phase 2: Defining Problems and Opportunities 36

vi Contents
Phase 3: Ideating Content Solutions 37
Phase 4: Prototyping Content 37
Phase 5: Testing and Validating Solutions 37
Tracking and Measuring Content Performance 38
Managing the Iterative Workflow and Continuous Improvement 38
Conclusion 39
Learning Activity 41
3 Building a UX Writer Outlook 42
Chapter Overview 42
Traits: Your Tools of the Trade 42
Listening Empathetically 44
Having a Strong Cultural Awareness 46
Being Digitally Savvy 47
Knowing When to Break the Rules 49
Advocating for Ethical Practices 50
Practicing Agile Collaboration 50
Seeing the Trees as Well as the Forest 52
Mentoring Others 53
Conclusion 54
PART 2
Processes 57
4 Empathizing with and Assessing User Needs 58
Chapter Overview 58
Starting with Empathy 59
What Is Goal Setting with a Client? 60
What Is Contextual Inquiry and Task Analysis? 62
What Are User Stories? 63
What Are Task-Based Usability Tests (aka “Protocol Analyses”)? 66
How Does Eye-Tracking Work? 76
What Are SWOT Analyses? 82
Conclusion 84

Contents vii
5 Defining Problems and Opportunities 88
Chapter Overview 88
Defining the Challenge 88
What Are Personas? 89
What Are Journey Maps? 96
What Are Content Audits? 102
Conclusion 106
6 Ideating and Prototyping Content 110
Chapter Overview 110
What to Do with Defined Problems? 110
Ideation: A Divergent Brainstorming Process 111
What Is Card Sorting? 112
What Is Affinity Diagramming? 114
What Is Participatory Design? 115
What Are the 6:1 and Four-Category Methods? 116
Selecting a Solution 117
Prototyping: Materializing Ideas 117
What Is Low-Fidelity Prototyping? 119
What Is High-Fidelity Prototyping? 120
Preparing to Test 122
Conclusion 123
7 Testing, Managing, and Deploying Content 125
Testing and Validating Content 125
What Is Usability Testing of Prototypes? 126
Limitations of Usability Testing 132
What Is A/B Testing? 132
What Is Heuristic Evaluation? 133
What Is Validation? 134
What’s Next? Strategies for Managing Content 135
What Is Structured Authoring? 136
What Are Content Management Systems? 140
Deploying Omnichannel Content 142

viii Contents
To Push or to Pull, that Is the Question 148
Conclusion 149
8 Tracking and Measuring Success 153
Attract, Engage, and Sustain Your User: Creating a Content
Framework 153
Tracking Your Users Online to Better Understand Their Attitudes and
Behaviors 154
Data Analytics Help You Understand Users in Their Journey 155
How to Analyze Users’ Interactions Before, During, and After Content
Deployment? 157
Understanding Audience and Their Behavior through Web Analytics 159
Building Content that Attracts, Engages, and Sustains Your Users 164
Using Key-Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Measure Content
Performance 166
How Can You Use Metrics and KPIs in UX Writing? 167
Adopting KPIs to Frame Your Content for Actionable Insights 170
A UX Metric Framework: The 3×3 Method 171
Validating Your Successful Metrics 173
What Is Benchmarking and How to Validate Measurements? 173
Sustaining User Engagement through Ongoing Measurements 174
Conclusion 175
PART 3
Practices 179
9 Popular UX Writing Genres and Tasks 180
UX Writing Products 180
Microcopy and Microcontent 181
Onboarding Experiences 183
Help Guides and Contextual Tooltips 185
Error Messages 186
Forms and Labels 187
Legal Notices 189

Contents ix
Settings and Specs 191
Designing Content with Style and Tone Guides 193
Designing Non-Textual User Interfaces: Video and Voice 193
Conclusion 195
10 The UX Writing Portfolio 198
Why Do You Need a Portfolio? 198
Where Should You Begin? 200
What Does a UX Writing Portfolio Look Like? 203
Component 1: About Yourself and Your Goals 204
Component 2: Your Problem-Solving Process 204
Component 3: Your Project Samples and Results 205
Portfolio Review 207
Conclusion 207
11 Using Generative AI and Automating Your Content 210
What Is Artificial Intelligence, Again? 210
The Limitations of AI and the Importance of Human-in-the-Loop
Approaches for UX Writing 213
Using Generative AI: A Demo 215
How Generative AI Actually Function 220
Automating Your UX Writing Content: Different Tools 221
Conclusion 223
12 AI Recipes for UX Writing 226
AI Characteristics That Are Important to UX Writers 226
How to Cook Up Good AI Prompts: Using the 6W and 1H Method to
Frame AI Prompts 227
Specific Prompt Commands for AI 229

x Contents
Idea Generation, Regeneration, Suggestions, and UX Techniques 230
Empathize Using AI: Conducting Preliminary User Research 231
Define Using AI: Competitors, Common Pain Points, and Design
Brief 233
Ideate Using AI: Page Layout, User Interface, and Wireframe 233
Prototype Using AI: User Flows, Design Systems, Copy 234
Test Using AI: Usability Tests, Interviews 234
Other General Tips 235
Create Images and User Interfaces Using AI Prompts 235
Conclusion 236
Glossary of Key Terms 239
Index 243

Foreword
Kirk St.Amant
Louisiana Tech University and the University of Limerick
When I first learned of this new textbook on UX writing, I was pleased for a number
of reasons. The first was that this collaborative work resulted from the Louisiana Tech
Usability Studies Symposium (LATUSS)—the event where the authors first met and first
began to discuss these ideas. Second, the book represents the realization of LATUSS’s focus
on “rethinking usability” by helping readers reconsider the role usability plays in design
thinking, content strategy, and technical writing as these areas relate to the burgeoning
field of UX writing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book does a masterful
job of advancing LATUSS’s focus on cognition in communication—particularly in how the
authors provide creative solutions to what I call the “3Cs of cognition.”
Usability is a matter of cognition or how the human mind processes information. Essen-
tially, the cognitive dynamics that affect how we perceive our surroundings influence the
way we use items in an environment. Such cognitive connections are not innate. Rather,
they are shaped by our experiences over time, and these dynamics play a foundational role
in the complexity of usability. Moreover, they often involve three interrelated factors, the
three Cs: Conditioning, Context, and Content. The better we can identify, understand, and
address these 3C aspects, the more effectively we can design items individuals find “usable”
based on their experiences. Understanding such factors is central to integrating usability
into more traditional technical writing processes.
Conditioning encompasses how we learn to use items based on our experiences and can
generally involve three approaches: (1) Active Instruction: when someone actively teaches
us how to use an item; (2) Passive Observation: learning from others and mimicking their
behavior; and (3) Independent Interaction: when we learn by “playing” with a new item/
technology.
In today’s technological environments, however, technical writers need to increasingly
rethink the nature of conditioning as related to usability. This is because the increase in
“out-of-the-box” UX now leads to a growing demand for independent interaction. Simply
put, users want to immediately do things with a product, service, or design, and they want
to do so without having to read a manual. This situation brings with it expectations that
the related experience is pleasant, memorable, and personalized—all of which go beyond
more conventional approaches to usability. This situation means usability is now expected
and framed in terms of overall UX. As a result, an understanding of UX factors can help us
better identify and address the usability and associated design expectations of different user

xii Foreword
groups. Such factors can also help us better understand the dynamics of groups interacting
in interconnected and wirelessly networked environments.
These conditioning situations are all closely connected to the second C of context or
the location where individuals perform activities. This is because we don’t use tools and
technologies randomly, nor do we always use them ubiquitously. Rather, we often associate
their use (i.e., how to use them) with specific settings. Many of us, for example, are now
comfortable using our mobile devices in public spaces. This situation, in turn, has led to
different social expectations for meetings, as people can now change their meeting location
on the fly by using their mobile devices to send their location to others.
This factor brings us to the final C of content. Content encompasses how we design
information so individuals can use it to achieve an objective in a setting. Accordingly, for
textual/verbal content to be usable, it needs to address what individuals expect to do and
use in a specific location. In today’s mobile and interconnected contexts, a growing chal-
lenge involves addressing the growing need for “microcontent” (small snippets of informa-
tion specifically tailored to an individual user) in a way that meets expectations for creating
reusable content. For example, it is common now to ask for the weather and have a digital
voice assistant such as Siri or Alexa provide us with an answer. Such new content expecta-
tions also extend to overall product design and affect whether individuals can recognize a
tool or technology in order to use it in a given setting.
The difficulty of such situations is that expectations for what constitutes usability have
shifted to the broader goal of achieving better UX. The result is a greater demand for posi-
tive experiences that are not only usable but also user-friendly, pleasant, and personalized
to the user’s personal history. When combined with the challenges associated with creating
microcontent and meeting the needs of networked users, the complexities of producing
usable technical writing can seem overwhelming.
The authors of this book, however, have found a new approach to addressing this situa-
tion. It involves rethinking UX writing as a combination of technical writing, design think-
ing, content strategy, and UX design. It is an approach that both adapts and combines
existing areas of study into a method for mapping the conditioning, context, and content
factors affecting usability expectations. What makes this approach particularly powerful is
that it also addresses usability in terms of the experience surrounding how we use products,
services, and overall designs. In addressing such factors, the book offers a new and impor-
tant perspective to academic researchers and industry practitioners working in UX, content
strategy, and design.
To examine these issues, the authors focus on the idea that understanding UX design
today means technical writers need to develop new skills—including those associated with
design thinking and content strategy. The authors also seek to refocus technical writing
practices to include new data analytics technologies—those that gather real-time data on
what the user is doing with a technology while they are using it.
Rather than addressing the question of “Can we identify the reflexive behavior shaping an
individual’s usability expectations?” the authors focus on the more fundamental, intercon-
nected questions of “What factors have shaped UX to create such behaviors?” and “How
can common industry practices help create the use and design of a broad range of human
experiences?” To answer these questions, the authors have written chapters that examine
seemingly different areas of design thinking, content strategy, and UX design. These entries,
however, are organized and connected in a way that forms a coherent and easily applicable
approach to usability in the context of UX. The result is a UX writing approach that is
adaptive to different groups, settings, and points in time. It is an approach that identifies the

Foreword xiii
cognitive dynamics shaping user expectations while also addressing industry expectations
for incorporating iterative design thinking techniques. In so doing, the approach uses content
strategy to develop and manage content. Additionally, it presents UX research strategies to
help engage and study how users are interacting with one’s content.
By interconnecting such factors, the text represents an important approach to addressing
many of the complex topics faced by society today. Moreover, it does so by mixing aca-
demic research with industry application in a way that connects to educational practices. As
a result, this book can easily be used within academic, industrial, or educational spheres as
well as across them. This adaptability makes the text a reference resource and a mechanism
for generating new knowledge, novel approaches, and original ideas around the core topic
of UX writing. Moreover, the adaptive nature of the approach presented in the text posi-
tions it well to stand the test of time.
The better we understand how experiences and exposure shape usability expectations,
and vice versa, the more effectively we can create tools and technologies for each other.
Likewise, by understanding how cognitive factors of conditioning, context, and content
shape such expectations, we can better contribute to society on local, regional, and global
levels. Ideally, such a process is a lifelong one as we learn from, think about, and adapt
to changing situations that shape our expectations for how to interact with the world
around us.

Preface
UX writing—writing for UX—may be new terrain for many readers who picked up this
book. You may see UX writing as a growing discipline that promises exciting trajectories
and opportunities for seasoned communicators or designers. Others may see UX writing
as the merging of technical writing, UX design, and content management—a sign of disci-
plinary growth. At any rate, UX writing is becoming an expected skill for those who work
with digital products and user-facing communication.
As academics who keep our fingers on the pulse of the latest industry trends and inno-
vations, we are excited to share what we’ve learned from our colleagues and on-the-job
practitioners who are leading the curve in establishing field standards and expectations
for writing and designing UX. By combining writing-as-design and design-as-writing, we
aim to break new ground for technical communication education where UX design and
writing share common missions and values toward social good. This book is an attempt to
theorize user-centered content design and apply time-tested, cardinal principles for writing
user-centered content. In doing so, we hope to create a new space for technical writing and
communication practitioners to expand their expertise and result in positive and desirable
outcomes in content design.
Preview of the Book
We have partitioned this book into three major parts. In Part 1: Perspectives, we introduce
the profession and principles of UX writing by discussing its relationship with technical
writing, UX design, usability research, and product development. If you are new to the
world of UX, you may appreciate how Chapter 1 gives you a succinct overview of its influ-
ence on current technical communication practices. In conjunction with this introduction,
we unveil the emergence of UX writing as a profession and offer a summary of its objectives.
In Chapter 2, we explain the design thinking model that powers the UX writing process.
You will learn the key principles, values, and phases of design thinking as they relate to the
content lifecycle. Then, closing out Part 1, Chapter 3 specifies the desirable traits of those
who perform UX writing—preferred skills and expertise—and qualitative attributes for a
successful career.
Next, Part 2: Processes zeros in on the five core phases of design thinking, starting with
Chapter 4, where we emphasize the importance of empathy and how it manifests in the
practice of user research. After learning about ways to learn about people’s attitudes and
behaviors with content, you can find methods for translating user needs into actionable
insights for content design in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, you will learn and exercise ideating
content solutions and making them into tangible, testable forms via prototyping. Chapter 7

xvi Preface
teaches you how to test prototyped content and manage its deployment to the public. Then,
Chapter 8 covers various technical and analytical tools to track content performance once
it is live.
In the last section of the book, Part 3: Practices, we explain the common forms of UX
writing and give you guidance on creating your own portfolio. Chapter 9 goes over six
popular UX writing genres and their associated tasks and challenges. You will examine
the forms, structures, and delivery of these content types. In Chapter 10, you can expect to
learn tips and tools for building an attractive UX writing portfolio with confidence. We will
show you how to apply the lessons from this book to land a career in UX writing. The final
two chapters, Chapters 11 and 12, offer an in-depth discussion about generative AI and
provide guidance on using it to augment UX writing.
Intended Users
We have written this book with the following audiences in mind:
• Undergraduate students in introductory professional writing and technical communica-
tion courses as well as special topics seminars in UX writing, usability research, and
user-centered design.
• Instructors who need pedagogical materials to deliver UX writing assignments that align
with technical communication objectives.
• Graduate students who require resources for their seminar papers, comprehensive exams,
and dissertations.
• Scholars and researchers in technical communication who desire an introduction to a
new area of research building upon UX, writing, and design theories
This book is both a textbook and a playbook. It can be used to teach a course; it can also
be a practical guide to evaluate existing designs and create new solutions. Students may find
this book to be an introductory resource toward a UX writing future, whereas practicing
professionals may benefit from the exemplary models included in the book.
UX writing combines user-design-centric methods and philosophies that attend to UX,
usability, and business objectives. UX writing is integral to product and service design and
integrates strategic content deployment. The fundamental goal of UX writing is to produce
usable and attractive content that boosts user engagement and business growth. As UX
writers draw upon various skills with agility and flexibility to address different work cycles,
this book conceptualizes these processes. Our approach teaches writers to create content
that helps users perform desired tasks while serving business needs. We strive to help writers
develop expertise at the intersection of user research, problem and opportunity definition,
content development and management, and continuous iterative design.
Designed to be a flexible core resource, this book offers students and practitioners the
essential principles and methods to succeed in writing for UX. Through the perspectives
of design thinking, content strategy, user-centered design, and data analytics, this book
provides an integrated approach that leads readers into the exciting work of UX writing.

Acknowledgments
Four years felt like a lifetime ago. If you asked us back then in the autumn of 2019—when the
three of us met for the first time at a usability studies symposium in Shreveport, Louisiana—
whether we would write a book on UX writing, the answer would be a resounding yes!
Why, you asked? First, we have Kirk St.Amant to thank for igniting a passion for UX
in the field of technical communication and for instilling in the three of us the trust to pull
together a project that would wind up being a sustained discussion about modern UX,
a series of journal articles, conference presentations, and then… this book! We are espe-
cially grateful to Kirk for his leadership and willingness to pen the foreword for this book.
Second, we had a hunch that UX is morphing into a whole new craft that requires
specific attention to what technical communication folks have always considered founda-
tional. We thank Ginny Redish for her insights and involvement with this project. Ginny
has appeared as a guest lecturer in Tharon and Jason’s classes to teach aspirational UX
practitioners about designing experiences. More importantly, she has helped provide com-
ments and edited early versions of this book, which made this current iteration the strongest
version yet, in our opinion!
Our confidence also came from the field, fueled by those who have taught UX and writ-
ing, like Tracy Bridgeford and Rebekka Andersen. We are grateful for their reading of our
manuscript and for providing helpful feedback and endorsements.
Of course, producing a book is no solo effort. We are grateful for the support given to
us by Routledge via former acquisition editor Brian Eschrich and current editorial assistant
Sean Daly. Sean has been especially instrumental in helping us through the manuscript sub-
mission and production processes. We must also thank Wendy Howard for volunteering to
proofread our book manuscript in the early stages of production. She has a sharp eye for
details!
The three of us are also thankful for the support given to us at our respective institutions
and through personal connections.
Jason would like to thank his colleagues at Texas Tech University for mentoring him and
encouraging his research trajectory. He is also grateful toward his students in UX research
and design courses, where he got to learn from them the most current design challenges
and immediate UX problems. He also thanks his colleagues in the field who have shared
cutting-edge ideas at various venues like the ACM Special Interest Group on Design of
Communication, the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, and
the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing. He is grateful to Tharon and Gustav
for sharing their leadership in this project and teaching him all the new things in content
strategy and emerging technologies.

xviii Acknowledgments
Tharon would like to thank his students in the Usability Testing Methodologies graduate
seminars, in UX Research seminars, and in the Content Strategy courses for all the examples
they created, for giving their permission to use their work in this book, and for helping him
see so many different and useful perspectives on UX writing. He would also like to thank his
colleagues in the UTEST-L online community who have shared their professional insights
into industry practices and the evolving nature of usability and UX research and design over
the past 30 years. Thanks also to alumni from the Clemson MAPC and RCID programs
now working in industry, who also shared their practitioner insights and their struggles
creating UX writing positions and departments in their corporations. Tharon would also
like to thank Jason and Gustav for their patience and for putting up with our team’s official
“old fart” telling war stories about the ways we did things back in the 80s and 90s. Thanks
for forcing me to think in 21st-century terms about the future of our profession.
Gustav would like to thank his colleagues at Central Michigan University, colleagues
who he has worked with at the Digital Life Institute, met at various conferences, and col-
laborated in writing different articles. He also wants to acknowledge Jason and Tharon
for being awesome collaborators who continuously push him to innovate in his thinking,
research, and writing.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274414-1
We open with an introduction to the profession and principles of UX writing by discussing
its relationship with technical writing, user experience design, usability research, and prod-
uct development. If you are new to the world of UX, you may appreciate how Chapter 1
gives you a succinct overview of its influence on current technical communication practices.
In conjunction with this introduction, we unveil the emergence of UX writing as a profes-
sion and offer a summary of its objectives. In Chapter 2, we explain the design thinking
model that powers the UX writing process. You will learn the key principles, values, and
phases of design thinking as they relate to the content lifecycle. Then, closing out Part 1,
Chapter 3 specifies the desirable traits of those who perform UX writing––preferred skills
and expertise and qualitative attributes for a successful career.
Part 1
Perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274414-2
Learning Objectives
• Understand and define writing for user experience.
• Articulate the relationship between UX writing and adjacent professions.
• Distinguish the needs for UX writing in designing products and services.
• Outline the motivations to study UX writing.
A Brave New World
Imagine that you are a newly hired writer at Microcorp who has been put in a team that
is working on the next release of Operating System Z (Figure 1.1). You have not met with
the entire team, but you have already been asked to give a brief presentation on how the
design team should begin working on the release. You may be asking yourself: What does
a writer have to offer to the design of a product? Why put a writer on the team in the first
place? What would you do in that scenario? If you were a technical writer in the 1990s,
you would probably wait for directives from product engineers to write documentation
after the prototype was done. But those days of using documentation as a “band-aid” for
mediocre user interfaces are long gone. In the modern workplace, you will collaborate with
the engineers in designing the experience for your users from the get-go. And this is because
organizations and companies know nowadays that the user experience is paramount. Sim-
ply put, if a user isn’t happy with their initial experience with a service, they will most likely
not continue to use it.
The role of a writer has evolved to be an integral part of the design process. According to
design strategist Leah Buley (2013), nowadays many roles in the tech industry are expected
to be a “team of one” and be able to fulfill many different roles in organizations, and this is
particularly the case with writers. Writers contribute directly to the design of a meaningful
1 Introduction to UX Writing
Chapter Overview
This chapter offers an introduction to the characteristics of UX writing. It defines the scope
and emerging practices of UX writing for readers new to UX as well as those who have worked
in traditional technical communication areas like documentation writing, information design,
content strategy and management, copywriting, and editing.

Introduction to UX Writing 3
experience between the end user and a product or service. In this opening chapter, you will
learn about the changing characteristics of writers in the digital age and the emerging prac-
tice of user experience writing or UX writing.
UX: The Design of Experience
To understand user experience writing, we need to begin by defining user experience. Often
shortened as UX, user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction
with the company, its services, and its products” (Norman & Nielsen, 2021). To put it
simply, UX is concerned with the human experience when interacting with an interface like
a website, user manual, or instructional video. Depending on the context of use, a user can
be an actual or potential reader, viewer, shopper, customer, or consumer. In the digital age,
users are afforded access to information and services from all around the world through the
internet and the web. While in this chapter and throughout the book we commonly refer
to UX examples that are online or digital, you should also apply the same concepts to local
and physical situations where user interactions happen every day.
Marketing professionals already know that good UX is important to any product or
service because we have to incentivize and attract users to a product by giving them some-
thing they want or need. Herbert A. Simon called this the “attention economy” (1971, pp.
37–52). We have to “remunerate” consumers’ attention, and the “economy” here is pretty
straightforward and commonsensical. Users have a limited amount of time and capital to
invest in their online experiences. Plus, they have a lot of competition placing demands on
Figure 1.1
A UX writer presenting a content strategy to a design team.
Source: Jason Goodman on Unsplash.

4 Perspectives
that temporal capital, or, as Mitch Kapor, a pioneer of the personal computing industry
and long-time startup investor, put it, we are always in “a competition for eyeballs” in the
marketplace (Malik, 2003, n.p.). As writers, therefore, our job is to figure out how to con-
vince users that the time they spend using our product is the best investment of their limited
time and capital. For most of us, the answer to this question is going to involve providing a
richer, more satisfying user experience.
We are essentially looking for ways to attract users to our products by convincing them
that the time they invest in us will be rewarded with the experience they seek. The analogy
that we think works well here is that of going to a restaurant. In his book, Design to Thrive,
Tharon wrote:
If you think about it, you don’t really go to a restaurant to fulfill your body’s needs for
sustenance. You could go to the grocery store, buy bread and peanut butter, and make
yourself a sandwich if all you wanted to do is feed yourself, right? You’re really after
something more than just food when you go to an expensive restaurant for dinner. What,
for example, is the attraction of Japanese steak houses and sitting around a hibachi grill
with a bunch of other people—usually complete strangers—watching your food cooked
in front of you and worrying if your hair is going to be singed by the obligatory grease
fire that you know is coming? Indeed, I asked my 18-year-old son about this recently
when he chose to have the family go to a Japanese steak house in order to celebrate his
birthday. Wouldn’t you, I asked him, rather go to the local, family owned steakhouse
which serves a better quality 20-oz. Angus Porterhouse for less money than the 5-oz
beef tips and 6 small shrimp you’re going to get at a hibachi grill? What’s the attraction,
I asked. Wouldn’t you rather have a better steak?
Of course, answering a question like that takes far too much conscious effort on the
part of an 18-year-old, so I got the same, long suffering, “you’re-so-clueless-Dad” look
that I get when I ask questions about what makes being a member of a World of Warcraft
guild so compelling. Still, I think the answer is pretty obvious. It’s not only about the
food; you’re also paying for the atmosphere, the service, and most of all, it’s about the
entertainment provided by the chef. The remuneration is the experience.
(Howard, 2010, p. 44)
So at this point, the importance of providing users, customers, and audiences with a posi-
tive user experience probably seems pretty commonsensical. Unfortunately, the problem is
that it is so commonsensical that most people (especially writers and designers) never think
about it. We have a tendency to take good UX for granted. As renowned architect and
system theorist Buckminster Fuller famously said, “Ninety-nine percent of who you are is
invisible and untouchable” (R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes, n.d., n.p.). In other words, we’re
so immersed in the business of completing tasks and getting on with our lives that we’re
usually no more conscious of user experiences than a fish is conscious of water. Good UX
is part of the air we breathe, which is why it’s nearly invisible—just like the popular design
podcast by Roman Mars also titled “99% Invisible” (https://99percentinvisible.org/).
While a person’s experience with a product may be so tacit that it’s unconscious and
invisible, the key takeaway here is to remember that good UX doesn’t just happen. Good
UX is designed and intentional, even though users don’t always notice it. How often, for
example, do you think about the products and components in your bed when you lay down
to sleep at night? If you’re like most people, chances are you snuggle under the sheets and
blankets and curl up on your pillow without a conscious thought about why the experi-
ence feels good. It just feels. And yet every aspect of that experience is the result of very

Figure 1.2 Grease fire entertainment by a hibachi grill chef.
Source: Howard (2010).

6 Perspectives
careful and conscious design decisions by a large number of product design teams. Take
the
bedsheets, for example. Most people won’t be able to tell you the “thread count” of
the sheets that they use every night, but the designers of your sheets certainly can. They
know that thread count is a measure of the number of horizontal and vertical threads per
square inch in the cloth, and (more importantly) the higher the thread count, the softer the
sheet and the more likely it will be to soften over time. Good sheets have thread counts
ranging anywhere from 200 to 800, and the highest-quality sheets have over 1000. And
thread count is only one factor in the UX design for a sheet; designers spend extraordinary
amounts of time researching materials (cotton, linen, bamboo, etc.), weave patterns (per-
cale weave, sateen weave, etc.), and new manufacturing processes. Sheet designers invest
tremendous amounts of thought in finding the best balance between the cost and the user
experience of our bed sheets so that we don’t have to. And the same thing goes for your
pillow, mattress, bed springs, blanket, bedframe, quilts, etc.
However, while good UX design is often so tacit that it’s unconscious and invisible to
the end user, the same can’t be said for poor UX. Earlier, we said that we are often no more
conscious of user experiences than a fish is conscious of water. But we definitely notice bad
UX design. When you try to make a purchase on a shopping website, but the interface won’t
allow you to select the item you wish to buy, that’s bad UX—and your frustration makes
you notice it. And you probably won’t come back to the website if it is frustrating.
One really famous example of people noticing bad UX is from former Apple employees,
Donald Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. Tognazzini (better known as “Tog”) was Apple’s
very first application software engineer, and he is famous because his early usability test-
ing and work with software interfaces in the 1970s led to Tog’s “Apple Human Interface
Guidelines,” which provided the foundation for Apple’s early success in the 1990s. Through
Norman and Tog’s work, Apple became successful because of the simplicity and ease of
use of its operating systems and software application designs. However, this all changed
when Apple developed its gestural user interface for use with iPhones and touchscreen
devices operated through hand movements and gestures. Apple abandoned the user inter-
face guidelines that had made the Apple II and the Macintosh successful, and they adopted
an approach that, according to Norman and Tog, focused on “look” rather than “feel.” In
their critique of the new gestural interface designs, Norman and Tog famously wrote:
Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about
making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining peo-
ple’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them.
Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The
production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers
today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health
care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer’s sole job is to make
things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understand-
ability, and ensuring ease of use.
(Norman Tognazzini, 2015, np)
One of the things that makes this quote so famous is that it is full of lessons for students
of UX and design. Of course, the first of these is that users notice and respond to bad UX.
But the quote also provides one of the best and most succinct definitions of modern UX
design. It rejects the idea that designers merely make things look nice and pretty. We tend
to think that, for example, an interior designer’s job is primarily to pick out complimentary
colors for furniture and wallpaper, but the definition here extends the idea that design is

intentional because it recognizes that it “combines an understanding of people, technol-
ogy, society, and business.” In other words, it requires research into what users need in all
aspects of their lives. It begins by defining users’ problems and the environments in which
those problems emerge and then designs experiences that solve those problems.
And even though it looks invisible and easy, good UX design is actually really hard. And
because UX design is challenging and in high demand by organizations, some jokingly refer
to the desire of companies to hire a “UX Unicorn” who can do it all, combine a great deal
of skill sets, and do all of these perfectly. That is why all three of us have an image of the
UX unicorn on our office door, to remind our students that you cannot expect to do it all
perfectly but that you do need to know something about each of these areas.
The Rise of UX Writing
In an age of content marketing and digital design—where users actively seek information
and where marketers find it an opportunity to sell products through information services
and experience design—content-first design promises short-term as well as long-term suc-
cess. UX-centric content makes for efficient design and a greater return on investment (King,
2022). The idea of content-first design is based on figuring out what content your user is
looking for before designing the interface, rather than creating an interface and hoping to
fill it with relevant content (Johnson, 2020). The same principle applies to UX writers—
they have to know how good content can be created first so the design meets the user’s
immediate needs and wants.
Many companies hire professionals trained in UX to support their product and service
designs. For instance, “UX researcher” and “UX designer” are well-established career posi-
tions that involve the study of consumer experience and the application of insights to the
design of products and services. A UX researcher develops and conducts user research such as
UX journey mapping, persona development, ethnographic studies, or think-aloud
protocol
analyses, whereas a UX designer’s role is more strategic—devising product structure, con-
tent strategy plan, and prototypes using the data collected by the UX researchers. In some
companies, these roles converge and could be performed by a UX specialist or a UX team.
We are seeing an increase in the number of job descriptions that appeal to writers who
care about UX (see Snapshot 1.1). Many companies are seeking to hire writers with UX
expertise to work in collaboration with designers to integrate content with interface design
in order to cultivate a good user experience.
Real World Snapshot 1.1: A UX Writing Job Description
(Archived in 2021)
UX Content Writer – Opportunity for Working Remotely!
Location: Boulder, CO – Remote
Salary: $95,000 – $162,000 a year
Job Type: Full time
Full Job Description:
We are looking for a UX Content Writer with experience in complex cloud applications to help
us transform the cybersecurity industry. In this role, you’ll collaborate with cross-functional

8 Perspectives
Since our experience with products and services is heavily influenced by the content
we consume—think about the number of posts, text messages, videos, memes, and audio
signals you encounter each day—UX writing is concerned with the integrative experience
between the user and product/service as it is mediated by different content. They include
texts or copy, images, videos/animations, sounds, haptics (touch senses), or a combination
of them. Good UX writing leads to a seamlessly positive experience between the user and
the product.
UX writing isn’t just a product, however. UX writing is also a process involving writing,
designing, thinking, iterating, strategizing, and developing content using different technolo-
gies to create a desirable user experience. This integrative approach urges you to see content
development as an interconnected activity that leads you down many different paths with
one goal: making a better user experience for the user.
Now, think about your smartphone (well, if you use one, or else ask a friend who does).
What was your experience like when you took it out of the box for the first time? Looking
at the shiny black mirror that reflects your excitement, what was your initial reaction? Were
you confused by it? Did you feel the need to read the user manual? Like most users, we bet
you just turned on your new phone and started swiping away immediately. You’re greeted
with a friendly welcome message and a quick-start wizard that walks you through the
setup process. And if it so happened that you stumbled upon something you were unsure
of during the setup, like pairing the phone with other devices you own, you’d have prob-
ably quickly found the option to just skip it. Just like that, in less than a few minutes, you
were all set and ready to post a new selfie on your Instagram with a whimsy hashtag like
#newphonewhothis.
People want to enjoy products rather than learn how to use them through user manu-
als. UX writing eliminates the dreadful process that hinders good interactions by designing
content that facilitates a desirable user experience (Figure 1.3).
Writing at Multiple Intersections
Good UX writing helps users perform desired tasks while serving the needs of marketing or
selling a product/service. To be successful in UX writing, you need to develop expertise at
the intersection of several connected areas, such as user experience research, content strat-
egy, and interface design, to list a few. The UX writing compass (Figure 1.4) is our attempt
to map out the different expertise required for doing UX writing. At times, your job may
require you to focus on one area, and other times you may need to draw from each of the
directions to consider how to develop your content for users more successfully. The com-
pass helps you consider which areas you need to draw upon.
UX writers need to develop a 360-degree situational awareness so they know which com-
petencies and complementary skills they need to draw from (e.g., design thinking, content
teams to design and deliver solutions that make it easy for our customers to make their organi-
zations more secure. You’ll use your UX knowledge, experience, and judgment to help us move
away from traditional manuals, designing and integrating lightweight, targeted assistance directly
into the platform UI. Your UX content design skills are integral to the continued success of our
industry-leading cybersecurity platform.

strategy, and user experience, among others). For instance, they may be involved in devel-
oping a content strategy plan at work but realize that, per content-first design principles,
they may first need to do design thinking to help formulate a marketing strategy with a
content team. This may lead to a discussion about the user experience of content before a
content strategy can be developed. Hence, having a compass to consider where you are is
important, as is knowing where you need to head next.
It is important to keep in mind that UX is always-already interdisciplinary. The relation-
ship between technical communication and UX has been seen as “intertwined” throughout
the last few decades (Redish, 2010; Redish Barnum, 2011). Many UX practitioners
today come from the line of technical writers who were initially trained to perform conven-
tional writing tasks like documentation, technical editing, and publishing. Since the 1980s,
however, the growth in information technology and personal computing has shifted the role
of technical communicators into that of information designers and content specialists. The
increase in desktop publishing tools and user-generated content forces writers to not only
be information producers but also experts in identifying, curating, and repurposing good
content to serve organizational needs.
Moreover, writers are expected to conduct field research and user studies in order to
gauge customer experience and needs. The popularization of design thinking and user-
centered design in the early 1990s has further expanded the role of the writer in product
Figure 1.3 UX writing creates positive, seamless product experiences.
Source: Timothy Buck on Unsplash.

10 Perspectives
development. Writers have now become an integral part of the ideation and innovation
processes in product design; they participate significantly in the processes of generating user
personas, creating product prototypes, and conducting usability tests. They then present
recommendations to stakeholders and designers to guide future development.
As digital products and services become more and more ubiquitous and pervasive in
our everyday lives, writers become increasingly involved in the planning, deployment, and
management of content on our screens and beyond. UX writers learn to map out a custom-
er’s “journey” when interfacing with a product or service, compose reusable (or modular)
content through single-sourcing, craft materials that can be accessed by multiple modes
of delivery (voice, sounds, words, and visuals), and engage with new and emerging tech-
nologies such as social media and artificial intelligence (AI) to craft relevant and desirable
content. Companies that provide digital services want to ensure an optimal user experience
through impactful content. In many cases, writers who are now content designers focus
on “answering a user’s need in the best possible way for the user to consume it” (Winters,
2019, n.p.). This is especially important when content is now accessed using different chan-
nels, including webpages, mobile devices, voice interfaces, and streaming services, among
others.
Content strategists research how users typically access content and strategize how con-
tent should be delivered from a company or business to a user. As companies seek to deliver
engaging content, writers focus on “business goals, organizational context, and user needs,
and then which tactical activities are necessary to achieve this success” (Batova Andersen,
Figure 1.4 The UX writing compass.

2016, p. 2). Content strategists thus think about the marketing of content in relation to the
goals of the organization and how consistent it appears to the user.
Most often, companies hire UX writers to do all of the above tasks, which is why UX
writing is growing as a popular profession. In this book, we will use the term “UX writer”
to encompass all these different task areas rather than focusing on a specific role in writing.
We see UX writing in the notion of “one job, many hats”—that UX writers perform some
or more roles in planning, researching, strategizing, ideating, prototyping, and testing while
on the job (see Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5 Writers perform many roles in designing the user experience.
Real World Snapshot 1.2: Vignettes of UX Writers’ Work
Environments: Larry’s Job
Larry works for a Fortune 100 company that, for more than 90 years, has been one of the lead-
ing distributors of maintenance, repair, and operating products and services to U.S. companies
and government agencies. As a business-to-business service provider, they have a wide assort-
ment of services, deep expertise, and innovative technology solutions designed to keep their
customers’ operations running and their employees safe. If, for example, a company has a large
fleet of delivery trucks that need to be maintained, Larry’s company offers the tools needed to
handle everything from when to service engines, pay insurance, rotate drivers’ schedules, and/or
purchase replacement vehicles. And even though it’s been around for almost nine decades, the
company’s success has come from embracing technology and change and doing deep, introspec-
tive work to deliver the best results for their customers and field teams. The company’s mantra
is “start with the customer.”
Larry’s title is Senior UX Manager, and the tool Larry works on is called “FixStock.” FixStock
is a $1 billion inventory management service that runs on a variety of computer operating sys-
tems and mobile devices and helps companies track when they need to replenish stock, rotate

12 Perspectives
and refresh expired items, maintain storage facilities (like freezers and vending machines), and
much, much more. FixStock has 1,800 field team members who support the software and
services, and as FixStock’s Senior UX Manager for the Midwest, Larry’s job is to evaluate and
recommend ongoing improvements to make the tool the “best-in-class” service for both the
company’s customers and the 1,800 field team members who support them. His job is to con-
tinue the company’s “start with the customer” mantra by integrating research into their work
and by measuring the usability of their web and mobile experiences.
As the Senior UX Manager’s job description states, some of Larry’s key tasks include:
• Providing expertise in planning and conducting exploratory, generative, and evaluative design
research.
• Collaborating with UX Design, Product Management, Analytics, and Business Partners to
translate business needs into research questions and hypotheses.
• Arming product teams with actionable insights to inform the user experience and product
roadmaps.
• Owning a research roadmap that will create transparency across product teams and ensure
insights are delivered when needed by product teams.
• Increasing empathy across the organization by establishing a research program that will give
product teams and business partners more exposure to the attitudes and behaviors of the
company’s users.
• Helping build and manage a customer research panel that will enable us to plan and run stud-
ies more efficiently.
• Helping formalize and operationalize UX Metrics.
• Determining what research tools we need to effectively plan and conduct research.
• Managing and growing our UX research and measurement talent.
As Larry’s job description shows, his position is both complex and interesting, and it demands
far more writing skills than simple wordsmithing, copyediting, and “microcopy” content creation.
Note: The Real World Snapshots throughout this book are based on real people at real companies;
however, the names have been changed to protect their confidentiality.
UX Writing Goals
One important distinction between UX writing and the conventional understanding of tech-
nical and professional writing (writing on the job) is that UX writing goes beyond content
creation. We will show a few examples later on. But it is important for those who perform
UX writing to understand that UX writing is writing within and around an interface. UX
writers think like product/service designers and use content to create an optimal user experi-
ence. Below, we feature a few key characteristics of UX writing that we’ll be covering more
in-depth in the rest of this book.
Writing to Gather Attention. We earlier referred to the smartphone scenario about how
UX writing is imperative to the whole “out-of-the-box” user experience. Now picture

companies seeking to understand what users do when they interact with content on their
devices as they go about their day. UX writers not only write the content for such exchanges;
they are also tasked with keeping track of what users say, think, and feel during these
exchanges as they interact with products or services. And as companies seek to capture the
user’s attention, they need writers who understand distracted users and who can develop
personalized content specific to individual users. For instance, you may want to know about
local restaurants that you can visit while driving to your destination using your phone’s map
or global positioning system (GPS). Companies understand that having a website is not
enough to attract these users, so they are looking to UX writers who understand users and
can develop content for situations like this.
Writing Intelligent Content. A seismic shift has taken place: content is no longer created
on the basis of users accessing a website. Instead, intelligent content (such as restaurant
recommendations based on your location or based on similar types of restaurants you’ve
ranked highly in the past) is now expected by users. Users want content that is easily acces-
sible, specific, and personalized for their circumstances rather than something they have to
actively look for on a website. Content should be able to be retrieved by users for a wide
variety of situations, but it also needs to be specific to what the user needs. And content
needs to be read by machines so a search engine can recommend restaurants near your GPS
signal. Indeed, companies are now “separating [their] … interface designs from the underly-
ing content structure” to address this new expectation for content (Atherton Hane, 2018,
p. 12). UX writers are important in these situations because they not only write content but
also understand content strategies to help push intelligent content to users.
Writing Sharable Content. As we know, users may now share content through various
digital channels (social media, web, apps, etc.) while using their mobile device while out in
the world. For instance, think about how you can modify your plans while you are meeting
up with a friend by sending them a new location through social media. Others may com-
ment, like, or share that content with others in your group to let them know where you are
meeting now. In other words, content is now social. Now picture companies knowing this,
and you will understand why companies now heavily invest in user experience design. They
want to ensure their product, service, or design works well for many users and avoid nega-
tive reviews from groups of people.
Writing to Influence User Behaviors. In order to ensure that users keep using products
and services, companies now also use what are called “nudges” to help influence the user’s
behavior. A “nudge” is a way of designing the interface to make users want to come back or
perform a certain action. Companies know that users remember extremely positive and neg-
ative experiences. This has led to the adoption of design techniques that seek to alter how
users respond to experiences by motivating them to perform a certain action. For instance,
Amazon.com uses many “nudges,” such as showing how many people bought a product
and featuring reviews, so that people are ensured to buy the product with confidence when
they visit a product page. And when a search error occurs (a negative experience), Google
displays a funny image of a robot so as to ensure the user is not alarmed and has a positive
experience instead of a negative one (Figure 1.6).
Writing to Gather Data. Content and UX design thus now form the basis for companies
to engage users through ongoing experiences in various channels (social media, web, apps,
and desktop) as they go about their day. For this reason, companies keep track of content
before, during, and after an interaction. As people now spend a large amount of time online,
users’ behavior can be seen by what they do while they access content online. Do they spend
a lot of time on your page or your app, or do they quickly navigate away? If they spend a lot

14 Perspectives
of time there, does that mean the content you offer is successful and lets them do what they
need to, or are they spending the time there because they’re confused by the content? UX
writers thus may also need to research what users are doing as they interact with content.
Various user metrics exist to understand what users do and think, such as time-on-task and
user evaluation scales. As a result, companies hire writers who can address these different
skills through writing, research, and content design.
Writing to Enhance Usability. On a finer level, UX writers pay attention to details that
affect the user’s interaction with a product, such as microcopy content on an interface.
In Figure 1.7, you can find a comparison between two simple microcopy designs. Micro-
copy refers to short texts on websites, digital applications, and interactive interfaces that
provide information or instructions to users. More examples of these genres can be found
in Chapter 9.
In this example, the two forms contain almost exactly the same information for a user to
fill out the fields; however, due to the positioning of error messages on the left form, users
may be confused by the errors and would need more context to correct the errors. In com-
parison, the microcopy design on the right places the error message and relevant corrective
options exactly where the actions need to be taken to help the user quickly recover from
the error. As we can see from this instance, it is a writer’s job to recognize the best practices
in such designs as microcopy to ensure a positive user experience as well as usability and
efficiency.
Writing to Sell. UX writing isn’t just about interface or content design. As we have indi-
cated in the UX writing compass, part of the responsibility of UX writing is to ensure that
whatever content (written or otherwise) is set to appear before a user or consumer should
work to achieve marketing objectives. In other words, writers work closely with market-
ing and sales teams to create content that entices users by making the product or service
desirable.
In sum, UX writing bridges technical writing and creative copywriting, which are tra-
ditionally absent from technical communication training. A UX writer needs the skill to
Figure 1.6
UX writing uses techniques to ensure the user responds in a positive way to the error

message by focusing instead on the funny-looking robot.
Source: Verhulsdonck and Shalamova (2020).

poetically weave technical specifications and product information with strategic content
that promotes sales and attracts customers. This can only be done if the writer is mindful of
the user’s needs and experience.
UX Writing Technologies: AI, Data Analytics, Oh My!
In the example we noted earlier, UX writers produce intelligent content that lets users find
restaurants near where they are going using just their mobile device. How is that done?
UX writing uses a number of technologies to make sure personalized content reaches the
intended audience. As you know, GPS signals indicate where you are, and that data can be
used by a search engine to find restaurants near you. But they have to be good restaurants
and ones you are interested in. For instance, you may want to go for Mexican food when
going to an unfamiliar destination before meeting your friend. You may use voice input
because you are driving and ask Google for “Mexican restaurants near me,” and you expect
your mobile phone to notify you about relevant restaurants with good reviews. It even
offers to modify your driving route to go to the restaurant before you meet with your friend.
Companies understand that users come to them with problems to solve or tasks to
accomplish, and they need writers to clarify this process for users. In this case, UX writers
understand that the user is really requesting, “Look for good Mexican restaurants near my
GPS location and tell me about them.” A number of technologies are working together to
produce this effect:
• Locative technologies (like GPS): to locate where you are when you ask this question.
• Voice recognition: to translate the words you speak (“Mexican restaurants near me”).
• Natural language processing: to translate what you are saying into a command and to
analyze what it means (“Look for good Mexican restaurants near me”).
• Data analytics: to analyze your question and match it with an answer based on online
information (“Check starred reviews online on good Mexican restaurants and aggregate
them for me, and tell me the best ones”).
• AI: to formulate an intelligible response using natural speech that you can hear as you
drive (“Here are some recommendations for good Mexican restaurants near you”).
Figure 1.7 UX writing is writing to enhance usability via design.

16 Perspectives
And this is just one instance of technology’s use. Depending on the context, UX writers
select appropriate technologies to plan, create, organize, store, and publish their content:
• Cloud-based drives for document sharing and collaborative composing.
• Graphic design suites for technical illustration and document design.
• Component content management systems for modular editing and publishing.
• Markup languages and standards for structured authoring.
• Data visualization tools for complex information.
• Prototyping and modeling applications for interaction design.
• Social media community management platforms.
All of this is to say that UX writers know that a mix of good content, understanding the
user and their task, and how various technologies work can help create powerful experi-
ences for users that will, in turn, add value to companies and organizations. And this is why
UX writers can expect to do more content design in the future: as companies use various
technologies to deliver content, users evolve alongside them and demand dynamic solutions
to their tasks through intelligent content.
Real World Snapshot 1.3: Vignettes of UX Writers’ Work
Environments: Laurie’s Job
While Larry is an example of someone who works in a department for a large, multi-site
corporation, another common situation in which UX writers find themselves is exemplified
by Laurie. Many companies and government organizations choose not to maintain internal
departments and staffs of specialists. Instead, they outsource their application development
needs.
Because they may not need new software applications for their operations once every three
to five years, it’s simply not cost-effective for them to pay for the salaries, insurance, retirement
benefits, and other overhead costs associated with maintaining full-time employees on their
permanent staff. Instead, they hire companies that specialize in providing software and web
application services on a contractual basis. Laurie works for one of these, and her company,
Namaste Labs, specializes in projects for federal and state agencies as well as large corporations
like Walmart, Lowes, and Magnavox.
Namaste Labs needs to meet their clients’ specific needs in a variety of computing envi-
ronments (e.g., mobile device applications, websites, mainframe databases, and iOS). Also,
they need to understand their clients’ task environments (what goals do users have for tasks,
where do they complete the tasks, what steps are involved, what are the successful comple-
tion criteria for the tasks, etc.). They also need to develop graphics for the interfaces, micro-
copy for the pull-down menus and other text in the interface, context-sensitive help systems,
training videos, and much more. Since clients’ needs will vary considerably from situation
to situation, Namaste Labs has project managers who work with writers to create propos-
als specifically tailored to meet each client’s situation, and for each case, they will create a

cross-functional development team comprised of UX researchers, UX writers, graphic design-
ers, UI interaction designers, project managers, and/or engineers necessary to meet the needs
of the project.
Like Larry, Laurie’s role as a UX writer is rarely limited to simply writing the microcopy for
an interface. She is often involved before the team is even created because she works with
the project manager on writing the proposal for clients and even deciding which specialists at
Namaste Labs will be needed for the team. She’s also involved in conducting research on the
end users of a product being created or updated for a project and is responsible for conducting
interviews and site visits with end users and conducting task analyses of their work. Like Larry,
she’s involved in creating personas of different user types from the demographic data she col-
lect, creating user experience maps that allow the whole project team to visualize each “touch-
point” where users interact with a product so that the team can design for those experiences,
and much, much more. Laurie’s knowledge of the users means she’s the member of the team
who creates the microcopy for the UI since she knows the terms users are seeking when they
are looking for pulldown menus or buttons to complete a task. She’s able to create effective
instructions on how to complete specific tasks, and she’s able to work with the graphic designer
to develop visual metaphors and icons that allow users to utilize the interface more successfully.
And because of her task analysis research, she helps the software engineers break the tasks us-
ers need to perform down into manageable parts so that the engineers can write their code in
modules. Bottom line: every team Laurie supports has different needs and different members,
so (like Larry), she needs to bring a far wider range of skills to her job than her job title, UX
Writer, might suggest.
Note: The Real World Snapshots throughout this book are based on real people at real companies;
however, the names have been changed to protect their confidentiality.
UX Writing Career Facts
Even though you may never have heard of the term “UX writer” before you picked up
this book, the fact is that many professionals have been and are pursuing careers with
the job title UX writer. And even if you knew that you could find jobs with the title UX
writer, many people are surprised to learn that some of the highest-paying jobs for people
who write in the tech industry aren’t held by employees with the title “technical writer”
or even “information product developer.” Instead, they’re actually held by people whose
job title is “UX writer” or “content designer.” Table 1.1 is from a 2021 survey by Yuval
Keshtcher of almost 800 writers around the world who work in the high-tech industry.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook, the
median salary of technical writers in the United States during 2021 was $74,650 per year
(BLS, 2021); however, as Keshtcher’s table shows, it’s possible for UX writers to earn far,
far more.
Keshtcher’s survey not only showed that the highest-paying positions were held by peo-
ple with the UX writer job title, but he also found that the median salary was higher. He
wrote, “You often hear that the job title doesn’t matter. Well, in terms of salary, that’s not

18 Perspectives
true. There is a clear tendency for some job titles to earn more than others” (n.p.). Here are
the median salaries for these common job titles:
As you can see, the top three high-earning titles are content designers, UX writers, and
content strategists (Keshtcher, 2021, n.p.).
In a different 2019 survey of over 200 UX writers around the world, Patrick Stafford
(2019) from the UX Writers Collective found that:
• 26% of respondents were identified as male across all job titles.
• 74% of respondents were identified as female or “mostly female.”
• 31% claimed 10+ years of experience.
• 44% claimed between 3 and 9 years of experience.
• 21% claimed between 1 and 3 years of experience
• 4% claimed less than 1 year of experience
Evidently, the field of UX writing is growing. It is a fine career for many writers who
are interested in creating desirable customer and user experiences for any product. Our
book is designed to give you tips and guidance on developing skills that can lead to a
promising career in UX writing. In the following chapters, you will learn about princi-
ples and concepts for effective UX writing, methods and technologies that are used in
UX writing, and projects that let you exercise UX writing and produce your own UX
writing portfolio.
Table 1.1 Highest-paying salaries for writers in tech around the world by job title (Keshtcher, 2021)
Country Max reported annual salary Job title
United Kingdom $376,895 Content Designer
USA $360,000 Content Designer
Sweden $240,479 UX Writer
Germany $194,085 UX Copywriter
Switzerland $168,527 Content Strategist
Netherlands $163,759 Content Strategist
Canada $146,000 Content Designer
Ireland $133,640 UX Writer
Australia $116,912 UX Writer
Table 1.2 The median salary for UX writing job titles in the US.
Job Title Median annual salary (USA)
Content Designer $117,500
UX Writer $110,000
Content Strategist $105,600
Conversation Designer $105,000
Content Director $100,000
Technical Writer $93,000
Content Marketer $80,000
Content Writer $70,800
Content/Copy Editor $70,000
Copywriter $65,449

Conclusion
UX writing is becoming increasingly important to our professional and everyday lives. As
you learned in this opening chapter, good UX is designed, and it is intentional in bringing
us good experiences with products and services. Yet, because good UX is invisible but very
important to how we feel about our experiences (which will determine whether we continue
with a product or service), UX writing is gaining prominence in the technical and service
industries. Due to the limited amount of attention of users with requirements for pleasant,
memorable, and useful experiences, companies are now looking for writers who combine
strong UX writing skills with competencies in copywriting, content design, and data analy-
sis to create usable content as well as user interfaces.
Rather than merely writing successful content for an interface, writers need expertise in
diverse areas to address how content functions in—and equally important, around—the inter-
face. This is because UX writing is about creating successful content for products and services
as experiences for different users across numerous channels. Users want a consistent experi-
ence with a product or service from a company. Yet companies know that such experiences
happen across various online and physical channels, which require strategizing to provide
a consistent experience for their users. As UX writing isn’t just about transmitting content
but also about adapting the experiences of users as they evolve, this requires different skills
beyond traditional technical or professional writing. Due to the need to develop memorable
content, UX writing not only bridges technical writing skills but also bridges creative copy-
writing, product development, and content strategy to promote sales and attract customers.
In thinking about how UX writing applies to your life, consider how you continue to use
various products and services in your everyday life. As we have shown as examples in this
chapter, your phone lets you send messages, use various apps, and connect with your friends
and family in an easy and pleasant manner. A restaurant you frequent offers not only good
food and ambience but also attentive staff and an entertaining experience. A ride-share ser-
vice such as Uber lets you quickly and easily order a ride and travel to places without the
hassle of waiting and paying cash. All of these instances involve content as part of a user
experience that needs to be pleasant, memorable, and easy to use. Now think of those prod-
ucts you are not using anymore. Most likely, they failed to provide a pleasant experience,
which shows how incredibly important UX is in a product or service. UX writing delivers
products and services in intentional and designed ways so you will continue to use them.
Chapter Checklist
• Good UX is about designing for experiences that are pleasant, memorable, and useful.
• UX is concerned with the human experience when interacting with an interface.
• UX design is intentional.
• Successful UX is invisible to the user but will determine if they will continue with a
product or service.
• Good UX design is often so tacit that it’s unconscious and invisible to the end user; the
same can’t be said for poor UX.
• UX writing is important to business.
• Companies are looking to engage users with limited attention who want positive
experiences using different products and services.
• UX-centric content makes for efficient design and a greater return on investment.

20 Perspectives
• UX writing is everywhere.
• Content is accessed through different channels, including webpages, mobile devices,
voice interfaces, and streaming services, among others.
• UX writing is writing in and around the interface and focuses on before, during, and
after a user interacts with content.
• UX writing isn’t just a product; it’s also a process involving writing, designing, think-
ing, iterating, strategizing, and developing content using different technologies to

create a better user experience.
• UX writing is multifaceted.
• UX writing not only combines technical writing skills but also combines creative
copywriting, product development, and content strategy to promote sales and attract
customers.
• UX writers need to develop a 360-degree situational awareness so they know which
competencies and complementary skills they need to draw from.
• UX writing involves writing to gather the user’s attention, creating a strong and seam-
less product experience, developing intelligent content to push to the user, gathering
data on your users, and aligning content with marketing goals for your users.
Discussion Questions
1 You’ve probably worked in a team before, maybe on a group assignment or on a com-
mittee for your student organization. How does writing happen in your team? Who
determines the quality of the content? How do decisions get made?
2 Observe any written content or documents around your workspace (like an employee
handbook or weekly schedule) or online (social media, emails, or your school’s website).
Which content is visible and which content is “invisible” on these documents? How do
you consider that distinction?
3 Recall a bad/unpleasant experience that you had with a product or service recently
(e.g., using your school’s learning management system, trying to understand an assign-
ment rubric, resetting the clock on your microwave). What made that particular expe-
rience a bad experience? How did you wish the experience would have turned out
differently?
4 Thinking about the same bad experience you had, consider what kinds of content could
have been improved to mitigate the bad experience. If you were to rewrite them, what
would you change?
Learning Activity 1
You have been asked to join a user survey group for your school’s student portal redesign
efforts. You are a sophomore who has used the student portal regularly to register for
classes, see tuition balances, download forms for your student organization, and check your
final grades. Now, pretend that the following screenshot represents the current version of
the student portal. You agree that it has been an awful experience navigating the portal. In
the user survey group, the research facilitators have asked you to sketch out your vision for
a better student portal. Keeping the needs you have in mind, sketch out a redesigned ver-
sion of the portal that would best serve your needs. Don’t worry about keeping any existing

content. Don’t worry about making the sketch perfect. Just pull out a piece of paper and
start pencil-sketching your idea (Figure 1.8).
Learning Activity 2
UX writing will continue to grow as a profession in technical and service industries since
we and our world are continuously becoming more reliant on good content to help us do
our work and improve our lives. Many technical communicators and professional writers
are finding themselves in UX writing roles; they are contributing to the formative identity
of a UX writer at a time when design and writing become increasingly intertwined and inte-
grated in product and content development.
1 Perform a web search with the keywords “UX,” “writing,” “content,” “design,” and
others that may be relevant to your career aspirations. Refer to the UX writing compass
back in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.5) for further inspiration.
2 Summarize your search results in a Venn diagram. What are the main domains that UX
writing occupies? What are the overlapping traits or practices?
3 Share your Venn diagram with a friend or classmate. Tell them where you see yourself in
the picture.
References
Atherton, M. Hane, C. (2018). Designing connected content: Plan and model digital products for
today and tomorrow. New Riders.
Batova, T. Andersen, R. (2016). Introduction to the special issue: Content strategy–a unifying
vision. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(1), 2–6. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/7448985
Figure 1.8 A current student portal.
Source: Author’s screenshot.

22 Perspectives
Buley, L. (2013). The user experience team of one: A research and design survival guide. Rosenfeld
Media.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021). Technical writer. Occupational outlook handbook. https://www.
bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/technical-writers.htm
Howard, T. (2010). Design to thrive: Creating social networks and online communities that last.
Morgan Kaufmann.
Johnson, S. (2020). 8 steps to content-first design. UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/8-steps-
to-content-first-design-fa2885b9caee
Keshtcher, Y. (2021). How much do UX writers actually make? Salary survey report 2021. https://
uxwritinghub.com/ux-writing-salary-survey-2021/
King, L. (2022). How content-first design creates a better user experience. Gather Content by Bynder.
https://gathercontent.com/blog/designing-content-first-for-a-better-ux
Malik, O. (2003, Nov. 9). Gather them eyeballs. Dawn of the Micro Pubs. https://om.co/gigaom/
gather-them-eyeballs/
Norman, D. Nielsen, J. (2021). The definition of user experience (UX). Nielsen Norman Group.
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Norman, D. Tognazzini, B. (2015). How Apple is giving design a bad name. Fast Company. https://
www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name
R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. https://www.brainyquote.com/
quotes/r_buckminster_fuller_165610
Redish, J. (2010). Technical communication and usability: Intertwined strands and mutual influences.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 53(3), 191–201. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/5556477
Redish, G. Barnum, C. (2011). Overlap, influence, intertwining: The interplay of UX and tech-
nical communication. Journal of Usability Studies, 6(3), 90–101. https://uxpajournal.org/
overlap-influence-intertwining-the-interplay-of-ux-and-technical-communication/
Simon, H.A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press. https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=fileitem=33748
Stafford,P.(2019,Aug12).UXwritersalarysurvey:HowmuchmoneydoUXwritersmake?UXWriters
Collective. https://uxwriterscollective.com/how-much-do-ux-writers-make-salary-survey-revealed/
Verhulsdonck, G., Shalamova, N. (2020). Creating content that influences people: Considering
user experience and behavioral design in technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing
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Winters, S. (2019). What is content design? https://contentdesign.london/content-design/what-is-
content-design/

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274414-3
Learning Objectives
• Recognize the distinction between content as a UX deliverable, a product, and a process.
• Describe the three continuums of UX writing as part of its taxonomy.
• Understand the lifecycle of content, from setting content requirements to evaluating con-
tent outcomes.
• Draw connections among multiple theories from adjacent fields to inform UX writing
principles and practices.
• Understand the design thinking process and how it supports the UX writing workflow.
Content as a Product and a Process
We opened this book with an introductory chapter that spelled out the modern needs for
user-centered content and how UX writing is born of those needs. User-centered content
design is paramount to consumer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and, more importantly, equi-
table experiences that promote ethics and justice. As you may already know, there are many
expectations for good content—timely, usable, useful, error-free, efficient, effective… you
name it—and UX writers are tasked with creating content that is shareable, relatable, and
pleasing. As well, the way we, as users, interact with devices and interfaces today calls for
increasingly personalized content for different types of users and tasks or scenarios.
2 The UX Writing Process
Chapter Overview
This chapter summarizes the iterative UX writing process as powered by the popular “design
thinking” model. It begins by considering content as deliverables and how various requirements
inform the design process. Then, the chapter offers an overview of the content lifecycle—from
strategy to creation to evaluation—showing the multiple facets of content design and where UX
writing is performed. The core of the chapter consists of an explanation of design thinking as
a framework for content design. Traditionally, design thinking and content strategy are seen as
mutually exclusive processes, but in this chapter, we show how they work together. The chapter
provides a synopsis of the key phases of design thinking, which constitute the five chapters in
Part 2 of the book.

24 Perspectives
UX writing encompasses many different things wherein the content is crucial for

facilitating a good user experience. Unlike the more conventional writing or technical
documentation, UX writing is instead writing in motion, as in content development and
implementation that are continuous and iterative in nature. UX writers work with shifting
dimensions of content design. As content needs to be shareable, relatable, pleasant, and per-
sonalized to the individual user experience, writers cannot assume they are creating content
only for a static page. Even though UX writers might be creating a “webpage,” they can’t
assume the “page” will be an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Rather, they design for multiple
screen sizes, devices, contexts, and user types. Depending on where users encounter the
content, they may need different outputs based on the device they are using and their imme-
diate needs. For example, a user may need directions to a new place they intend to travel to,
listen to a digital voice assistant about the weather, or use an app while they are trying to
do something. All of these require dynamic microcontent (see Chapter 9 for examples) that
responds to the immediate situation of the user.
The attention to such omni-design aims to create an experience that resonates with the
user and is pleasant and informative—what some marketing strategists call a total experi-
ence. And that experience can be with a physical product, a service experience (like ordering
something from Starbucks), or an online interface, and it requires successfully managing the
above processes in devising and delivering content.
Real World Snapshot 2.1: Content Design vs. Content
Marketing
In the late 90s, Bill Gates famously coined the phrase “Content is king” to indicate how content
is equally as important as the physical product it serves in our so-called attention economy (Pa-
palamava Garcia, 2019). People consume content as part of their everyday routine and culture.
What’s more, the social web affords and promotes the sharing and resharing of content, making con-
tent an invaluable yet immaterial commodity. This phenomenon turns many business strategists to
the notion of content marketing—creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content
to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Nevertheless, is content marketing the same as content design? The short answer is “no.”
While content marketing aims to sell segments of a brand or product, content design serves the
larger goal of creating and maintaining a desirable user experience for a product. Content design
deals with strategy, as the content development agency Fractl (Milligan, 2019) puts it:
Without a strategy, the content on your site won’t be user-friendly or helpful to your read-
ers. The strategy is needed to stay on-brand, to capture a voice, and to release content at
the ideal time. Meanwhile, content marketing is what you need to elevate your strategy into
generating leads and boosting your search rankings.
It goes without saying, both content marketing and content design need good content to achieve
their respective goals. So, there are inevitable overlaps between marketing and design, including
strategic planning and content promotion. Indeed, content may be king, but be sure to attend
to other “royalty”—i.e., design and strategy—as well.

The UX Writing Process 25
In the world of UX writing, content is the product, or, the deliverable. The UX of content
directly affects users’ perceptions of the brand, the organization, or even the entire industry.
Many companies know the importance of paying attention to content design. As you will
see in the variety of examples we cover in Part 2 of the book, these examples apply user-
centered content design strategies to understand user requirements and emotional reactions
to different scenarios involving the organization’s product. One of such methods is “UX
journey mapping”—a research-driven approach to visualize users’ encounters, pain points,
desires, and opportunities. You will learn more about this method in Chapter 5.
A user-centered approach to design can help companies develop seamless and continu-
ously engaging products for users. Yet users grow along with content. What might be good
content today may be undesirable tomorrow. For example, think of how Clippy in Micro-
soft Word has given way to users expecting to use voice commands on their phones to get
relevant information that they need. All in all, since content is social, shareable, and relat-
able and needs to be personalized, engaging, consistent, and dynamic for users, UX writing
is a challenging practice that is a continuously evolving field of practice.
But for the purpose of this book, we have to draw a more defined parameter for UX
writing as a product as well as a process. As we describe in a later section here, UX writing
combines solid principles of technical communication with human psychology, learning
behaviors, human-technology interaction, rhetorical design strategies, and UX research into
a total experience that is not only about the experience of the content interface but also that
which is happening around the interface. It is also about knowing the exchanges between
the user, device, and content and measuring this in a dynamic manner so it performs opti-
mally in dynamic ways using common UX metrics for engagement, time-on-task, and task
effectiveness.
As a process, UX writing depends on a recursive, iterative way of crafting and refining
content in order to design something that is truly responsive to user needs. In this chapter,
we will cover a cyclic model that UX writers use to develop desirable content. Before getting
there, however, we are going to start by defining the scheme of UX writing.
The UX Writing Taxonomy: Three Continuums
Up until this point, we have not specified what UX writing looks like. If you’ve skimmed the
table of contents for this book, you may notice that we dedicated Chapter 9 to identifying
and expanding on the common applications of UX writing today. Here, we offer a rather
generous overview of the UX writing taxonomy with help from current industry trends and
U.S. federal government requirements. We synthesize these practices into three dimensions
(Figure 2.1).
The first continuum we’d like to discuss is narrow vs. wide UX writing. While the nar-
row/wide UX continuum is surely more than binary (and not mutually exclusive), it pro-
vides a direct comparison between micro and macro components of UX writing. Narrow
UX writing is concerned with accuracy and efficiency, both of which would immediately
impact the experience of a user when using content. Narrow UX writing focuses on micro
aspects of design that have to do with interactivity with an interface (e.g., buttons, menus,
links), task assistance (like user guides, error messages), and information processing (web
forms, logins). In Chapter 9, we provide an expansive list of examples to show you the
common tasks involved in designing these content types. Narrow UX may also be specific
to certain users or groups; thus, it could be considered localized or internal writing. An
example of this would be style guides for a particular brand/product.

26 Perspectives
Narrow UX is to trees what wide UX is to a forest. On the one hand, narrow UX
writing deals with details. On the other hand, wide UX writing is concerned with global
UX issues, such as international standards (like the ISO 9241-210),1
regional or national
culture, accessibility, and ethics. In other words, wide UX writing looks beyond situated
aspects of design to cover big-picture matters that have strong generalization value across
user populations and use contexts. For examples:
• Write content that does good and does no harm to anyone, intentionally or not.
• Avoid producing content that detracts from a content provider’s value proposition.
• Ensure that every piece of content is accessible to everyone from anywhere.
• Create appropriate notices for users regarding privacy settings.
• Consider the digital carbon footprint. Foster sustainable consumerism to avert overuse.
• Be conscious of a given piece of content’s effects on users’ health.
These matters are external to an organization or product’s convention. They guide writers
and designers in creating content that serves a larger audience and has an ethical purpose.
The second continuum UX writers need to consider is machine-focused vs. human-
focused content design. Similar to the first continuum, this non-exclusive comparison lies
on a spectrum with some overlapping interests. Since the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)
in computing, content has been consumed not just by human readers but also by “smart”
agents that are programmed to detect language patterns and process linguistic data pro-
vided by people or other computing machines.
An example of machine-focused content design is writing for applicant tracking systems—
software that helps companies organize job applications and select qualified candidates based
on predetermined criteria. Yeqing Kong and her colleagues at North Carolina State Univer-
sity have studied the impact of AI-assisted automated recruiting
technologies—including
asynchronous video interviews, social media profiling, and neuroscience games—and noted
that writers need to compose their materials (in this case, job application materials) for non-
human readers that may weigh certain qualities (like credentials) greater than traditional
human biases (like emotions).
For UX writers, this distinction is a kind of expanded audience awareness. It is not just
about catering content for a particular readership but also recognizing how the “reading”
Figure 2.1 The three dimensions of the UX writing taxonomy.

Figure 2.2
Create a personality for chatbots with desirable traits using high or low extraversion
characteristics.
Source: Nerds Company (2019).
method, or rather screening protocol, by AI agents may favor information differently than
a human reader. The same awareness applies to conversation design in chatbots used across
social media and many websites. Chatbot assistants can be incredibly cost-effective and
time-saving for service-driven organizations, but UX writers must pay attention to the bal-
ance between talking to a human and talking with a human. AI chats need to sound natural,
human, and better yet, humanized, which means that content should “get” human needs
and emotional experiences. Figure 2.2 compares high and low “extraversion” in chatbot
reactions to show the different effects they incite.

28 Perspectives
The third continuum is the comparison of content-oriented vs. people-oriented compo-
nents in UX writing strategy. This existing comparison is made by the U.S. General Ser-
vices Administration’s technology transformation branch, which focuses on digital services.
Relying heavily on Kristine Halvorson’s (2011) work, this continuum separates the product
from the producer (see Table 2.1). Content-oriented components include the goals of the
content, which inform its structure. Whereas people-oriented components focus on work-
flow, roles, policies, and standards that inform the lifecycle of content design, which we will
talk about next.
In sum, the taxonomy of UX writing provides three dimensions for understanding con-
tent design. Each dimension is a way into evaluating UX writing purposes, methods, and
potential outcomes. UX writers should be able to discuss their approaches through these
distinctions.
Content Lifecycle
Like any writing process, UX writing lives on a productive lifecycle that shapes the work-
flow of content creation, distribution, performance measurement, and improvement. By this
point, you may have read about many content-related keywords or processes that sound
quite identical: content “strategy,” content “development,” content “management,” etc.
These specific terms meant different parts of the design process. This section will piece
together the puzzle using these terms and teach you the language for describing the UX
writing process.
According to the U.S. General Services Administration (via usability.gov), there are five
major stages in the lifecycle. In general, a content lifecycle includes the following:
• Audit and Analysis: Content stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis, objective
analysis, and evaluation of the content environment (site, partner content, sister, and
parent sites).
• Strategy: Determine topical ownership areas, taxonomy, process/workflow for content
production, sourcing plan, voice, and brand definition.
• Plan: Staffing recommendations, content management system customization, metadata
plan, communications plan, and migration plan.
Table 2.1 The “content strategy quad” devised by Brain Traffic, a content services company
Content-oriented components People-oriented components
Identify Goals and Substance: focuses on what
content is required to successfully execute your
core strategy. It includes characteristics such as
messaging architecture, intended audience(s),
and voice and tone.
Outline the Roles and Workflow: focuses on
how people manage and maintain content on a
daily basis, including the roles, tasks, and tools
required throughout the content lifecycle.
Determine Structure: focuses on how content is
prioritized, organized, and accessed. Focuses on
the content itself, including mapping messages
to content, content bridging, and creating
detailed page tables.
Identify Policies and Standards: focuses on the
policies, standards, and guidelines that apply
to content and its lifecycle, as well as how an
organization will sustain and evolve its content
strategy.
Sources: Usability.gov (https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/content-strategy.html).

• Create: Writing content, asset production, governance model, search engine optimiza-
tion, and quality assurance.
• Maintain: Plan for periodic auditing, advise the client, and determine targets for success
measures.
While these five general stages make up the backbone of the lifecycle, they contain more
complexity when taking into account the need to evaluate and optimize content once it is
implemented. To show a more expansive view of the lifecycle, we have mapped these stages
onto the content circuit as shown in Figure 2.3.
The content lifecycle begins with research (i.e., auditing and analyzing). To create a set
of requirements for content, which will serve as your overall project backlog, you and your
team start by talking to users to gather insights and understand their needs. Then, you
need to devise a strategy—a plan of action—to create the desired content. This strategy is
informed by your motivations based on user research and the reality of your project (how
much time and resources you have at your disposal). The actual crafting and designing of
the content stage is known as content development. Often, industry practitioners use it
interchangeably with content strategy. But we see planning and developing as two inter-
dependent but distinctive stages. During the development stage, writers also create plans
for managing the content as it is being developed. Content management typically involves
Figure 2.3 Content lifecycle, adapted and expanded from Usability.gov.

30 Perspectives
systems and platforms that support collaborative composition, single-sourcing workflows,
and asset management. Note that this whole process is iterative, meaning that writers do
not simply check off a list of to-dos in a linear approach but instead go back and forth on
content research, strategy, planning, and creation.
When parts or all of the desirable content have been created and are ready to be deployed,
you enter the next stage called content delivery. As the name suggests, delivery is about
sending your content into the world so actual users can interact with it. This stage requires
coordination between you (the design team), your organization’s public-facing communi-
cation experts (i.e., public relations, spokespersons, etc.), and if relevant, the client who
commissioned the content. Here’s where we depart from the conventional five-stage model.
Our content lifecycle does not end here. Immediately following the delivery stage is prepa-
ration for testing the implemented content. As indicated in Chapters 7 and 8 of this book,
we advocate for a continuous improvement approach to content design. Once the content
is out in the world, your team should track and measure the performance of the content
using indicators that are appropriate for your context. With the findings about content use
and users’ reactions, your next focus is devising an optimization strategy to address arising
concerns and leverage any emergent conditions that could be tweaked to benefit the perfor-
mance of your content.
Here are some guiding questions for each stage of the content lifecycle:
1 Content requirement: What’s our motivation for creating new content and/or updating
existing content?
2 Content strategy: How should we go about creating and updating the content? What
should be the project workflow (starting and ending points)?
3 Content development: What topic(s) should we focus on? What informs our topic deci-
sions? How should we review content as it gets developed?
4 Content management: How should we manage the content being developed or edited?
How might we collaborate on this activity?
5 Content delivery: How should we publish the approved content? How can we help users
find the content? How might we localize the content for different audiences and contexts?
6 Content evaluation: How should we assess the impact of the content? How do we know
when to update the content? How might we remove or archive content?
7 Content optimization: What are the concerns facing users brought about by our new
content? What conditions are there that could enhance the success of the content?
Depending on the nature of your project, the content lifecycle may re-loop, and you might
be taken back to a second, third, or fourth research phase to develop a new strategy and
craft new content. As with the overarching mindset for design that we discussed in Chapter
1, the UX writing process is an iterative (cyclic, repetitive) process that favors improvement
rather than merely checking milestones. Before we say more about the framework that we
rely on to power an iterative process of UX writing, we need to look at several foundational
principles built by experts and theorists from adjacent fields that have had strong influences
on UX and writing practices.
Major Theories That Inform UX (and) Writing
UX as a practice has borrowed from social scientific disciplines and the humani-
ties to cement the theoretical groundwork for describing and predicting human

behaviors. As a modern profession, UX and writing benefit from other disciplines
that also care about human
interactions and how we make sense of things in the
world. Here, we focus on four disciplines that we believe have the strongest influence
on UX writing: psychology, human factors, rhetoric philosophy, and business
project management.
UX writing understands human behaviors by learning from the field of psychology.
Notably, American psychologist Don Norman (at the University of California, San Diego
until 1993, and later the Nielsen Norman Group) has called attention to the use of cogni-
tive science to study how people perceive problems and solutions in technological environ-
ments. Norman and Stephen Draper coined the term user-centered design in 1986, a project
that gave birth to the UX profession. Norman’s widely adopted book, The Psychology
of Everyday Things (later retitled The Design of Everyday Things), applied the notion of
conceptual and mental models to explain how humans learn to interact with interfaces and
figure out unfamiliar situations. Other psychological theories—such as Gestalt, priming,
and
memory—are common principles used in UX design. Gestalt principles reveal how
the human mind attempts to simplify and organize complex visual information (a popular
example is how the mind’s eye will fill in the missing parts of an image to create a whole,
which we will see in the discussion of eye-tracking in Chapter 4). Priming effects are used
in design to mentally prepare the user for subsequent effects or tasks. For example, if you
tell a kid about red cars before going on the road, they are likely to notice more red cars
during the trip.
Memory is arguably the most important consideration for UX designers and writers
because it directly affects the presentation of information. Cognitive load is the amount of
mental effort required to form a person’s working memory (what’s needed to do an active
task). Since the human brain prefers to conserve energy, the less effort needed to perform a
task, the better. This is why UX writers present information in chunks or categories, which,
according to cognitive psychology, helps reduce cognitive load for information processing
and improve short-term retention of the information. As human memory degrades due to
aging, UX writers also need to consider other strategies to create content that is accessible
to older users.
Besides concerns about the brain and the mind, UX professionals need to pay atten-
tion to human physical—or rather, physiological—factors. This is why in many psychology
departments, there is an area of emphasis called “human factors” and “ergonomics,” an
offshoot of UX that focuses specifically on the human body and psychomotor issues related
to voluntary and involuntary actions. These actions can affect a user’s productivity, safety,
and error prevention. For UX writing, human factors principles can guide the design of con-
tent usability, such as button display, font sizes, colors, and paragraph length for interfaces
of different sizes.
Within the North American context, UX largely resides in language and writing depart-
ments, creating a close affinity between UX and the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, as one of
the classical areas of formal education, is concerned with discourse and persuasion. It is a
study of techniques for informing or motivating people in a given situation. For more than
2,000 years since its invention, this ancient art of communication is still prominent today in
UX writing because rhetoric teaches practitioners to identify the available means for influ-
encing people for specific purposes. Rhetoric also appeals to philosophical concerns such
as ethics and virtue, which are increasingly important to UX writing given the cultural and
political climate our society is experiencing. UX practitioners apply rhetorical principles to
design effective, engaging, and ethical content.

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KENTISH
COAST ***

THE KENTISH COAST
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old.
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland
Highway.
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History
on an East Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to
South Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of
Reproduction.
Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.
The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The Dorset Coast.
The South Devon Coast.
The Old Inns of England. Two Vols.
Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).
Haunted Houses; Tales of the Supernatural.
The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna Green. Two
Vols.
The North Devon Coast.
Half-Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.
The Autocar Road Book.
The Somerset Coast.
The Cornish Coast. North.
The Cornish Coast. South.
Thames Valley Villages
The Shakespeare Country.
The Sussex Coast.
[In the Press.

DOVER CASTLE: THE WHITE CLIFFS OF ALBION.
THE
KENTISH COAST

BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
“Kent, in the commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle:
Sweet is the country, because full of riches;
The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy.”
King Henry the Sixth (Second Part).
London: CHAPMAN HALL, Ltd.
1914

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
DEPTFORD AND PETER THE GREAT 1
CHAPTER II
GREENWICH—THE ROYAL NAVAL HOSPITAL—
THE “FUBBS YACHT”—THE GREENWICH
WHITEBAIT DINNERS—WOOLWICH—THE
“PRINCESS ALICE” DISASTER—LESNES
ABBEY—ERITH—DARTFORD 15
CHAPTER III
STONE—GREENHITHE—NORTHFLEET—
HUGGENS’S COLLEGE—ROSHERVILLE—
GRAVESEND—SHORNEMEAD—CLIFFE—
COOLING—THE HUNDRED OF HOO—THE
ISLE OF GRAIN—HOO ST. WERBURGH—
UPNOR CASTLE—STROOD 31
CHAPTER IV

ROCHESTER AND CHATHAM—BROMPTON—
GILLINGHAM—GRANGE—OTTERHAM QUAY
—LOWER HALSTOW—IWADE 57
CHAPTER V
SHEPPEY 67
CHAPTER VI
THE CAPTURE OF JAMES THE SECOND—
FAVERSHAM 88
CHAPTER VII
MILTON-NEXT-SITTINGBOURNE—
SITTINGBOURN—OLD INNS—MURSTON—
LUDDENHAM 94
CHAPTER VIII
GOODNESTONE—GRAVENEY—SEASALTER—
WHITSTABLE AND THE OYSTER FISHERY 103
CHAPTER IX
HERNE BAY—RECULVER—WANTSUM—SARRE 116
CHAPTER X
THANET’S CORNFIELDS—MONKTON—
MINSTER-IN-THANET—BIRCHINGTON—
130

QUEX PARK—WESTGATE—DANDELION
CHAPTER XI
MARGATE 144
CHAPTER XII
KINGSGATE—THE NORTH FORELAND—
BROADSTAIRS—ST. PETER’S 156
CHAPTER XIII
RAMSGATE 167
CHAPTER XIV
PEGWELL BAY—EBBSFLEET—THE LANDINGS OF
HENGIST AND OF ST. AUGUSTINE—
RICHBOROUGH 177
CHAPTER XV
SANDWICH 188
CHAPTER XVI
WORTH—UPPER DEAL—DEAL—THE GOODWIN
SANDS 214
CHAPTER XVII

THE DOWNS AND THE DEAL BOATMEN 240
CHAPTER XVIII
WALMER CASTLE—KINGSDOWN—ST.
MARGARET’S BAY 256
CHAPTER XIX
DOVER—THE CASTLE AND ROMAN PHAROS
—“QUEEN ELIZABETH’S POCKET-PISTOL”—
THE WESTERN HEIGHTS 270
CHAPTER XX
THE CHANNEL PASSAGE—THE NATIONAL
HARBOUR AND ITS STRATEGIC PURPOSE—
SWIMMING AND FLYING THE CHANNEL 284
CHAPTER XXI
SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF—SAMPHIRE—THE
CHANNEL TUNNEL—COAL IN KENT—THE
WARREN 298
CHAPTER XXII
FOLKESTONE—THE OLD TOWN AND THE NEW
— DICKENS AND “PAVILIONSTONE”—
SANDGATE 308

CHAPTER XXIII
SHORNCLIFFE CAMP—THE ROYAL MILITARY
CANAL —HYTHE—ROMNEY MARSH—THE
MARTELLO TOWERS—THE “HOLY MAID OF
KENT” 319
CHAPTER XXIV
NEW ROMNEY—SMUGGLING DAYS—
BROOKLAND— FAIRFIELD—SMALLHYTHE 344
CHAPTER XXV
LYDD—DUNGENESS—CAMBER-ON-SEA 359
INDEX 371

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Dover Castle: The White Cliffs of Albion Frontispiece
PAGE
Deptford Green: St. Nicholas’ Church
and Church-house 7
Greenwich Hospital 17
The “Old Fubbs Yacht,” Greenwich 19
Ingress Abbey 33
Tilbury Fort 37
Curious old Boat-cottage at Chalk 39
Shornemead Battery 41
Cliffe Battery 42
Cooling Castle 43
The “Charter,” Cooling Castle 45
Graves of the Comport Family, Cooling:
“Like Chrysalids” 46
Stoke 49
St. James Grain 51
Upnor Castle 55
The Medway: Rochester Castle and
Cathedral 61

The Medway: Hoo Forts 63
Upchurch 65
Lower Halstow 67
Minster-in-Sheppey 73
Tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland,
Minster-in-Sheppey Church 76
Harty Church: Faversham in the
Distance 83
Late Fourteenth-Century Chest, of
German origin, carved with
representation of a Tournament,
Harty Church 85
The Town Hall, Faversham 90
Faversham 92
The Church, Milton Regis 95
The Town Hall, Milton Regis 97
Sign of the Adam and Eve, Milton-next-
Sittingbourne 99
Luddenham 101
Whitstable: The Old Lighthouse and the
Oyster Fleet 111
Herne: The “Smuggler’s Look-out” 120
Reculver 123
The Wantsum Ferry 126
St. Nicholas-at-Wade 128
Minster-in-Thanet Church 133

The Waterloo Tower, Quex Park 139
Dandelion Gateway 141
From the Palimpsest Brass, Margate
Church 147
Kingsgate 157
The North Foreland Lighthouse 158
Broadstairs: York Gate 163
Broadstairs 164
Thanet as an Island, showing the
Wantsum. From an ancient map 185
Fishergate, Sandwich 189
The Town Hall, Sandwich 211
Upper Deal 215
The Quaint Foreshore of Deal 221
The Goodwin Sands: “A dangerous flat
and fatal” 236
The East Goodwin Lightship 238
Walmer Castle 258
Entrance to Walmer Castle 259
Walmer Castle, from the Sea 262
St. Margaret’s Bay 263
Westcliff 268
Dover Castle 272
Colton’s Tower, Dover Castle 273
The Church of St. Mary-in-the-Castle, 275

with the Roman Pharos, Dover
The National Harbour, Dover 287
Shakespeare’s Cliff 298
Shakespeare Cliff Colliery, and the Coast
towards Folkestone 304
The Stade, and Old Tackle-Boxes,
Folkestone 310
Interior, Sandgate Castle 316
Hythe 321
Romney Marsh: The Martello Towers
and Military Canal, Moonlight 334
Lympne 331
Lympne Castle and Church 333
Bonnington Church 342
New Romney Church 345
Brookland Church 349
Fairfield Church 352
Smallhythe Toll-gate 354
Smallhythe Church 356
Smallhythe 357
Lydd Church 361
Dungeness: Lighthouse and Railway
Station 366

The Kentish Coast: Deptford to Faversham

CHAPTER I
DEPTFORD AND PETER THE GREAT
The seaboard of Kent, and indeed the south coast of England in
general, is no little-known margin of our shores. It is not in the least
unspotted from the world, or solitary. It lies too near London for
that, and began to be exploited more than a hundred and fifty years
ago, when seaside holidays were first invented. The coast of Kent,
socially speaking, touches both extremes. It is at once fashionable
and exclusive, and is the holiday haunt of the Cockney: a statement
that is not the paradox it at first sight appears to be, for the bracing
qualities of its sea-air have always attracted all classes. We all
ardently desire health, whether we are of those who romp on the
sands of Margate or Ramsgate and eat shrimps in the tea-gardens of
Pegwell Bay, or are numbered among those who are guests at the
lordly Lord Warden, the Granville, or the Cliftonville.
Where does the coast of Kent begin? It begins at Deptford, that
crowded London suburb which would doubtless be considerably
astonished in contemplating itself as a seaside town, and in fact
does not do so. Yet Deptford’s old naval history and ship-yard
associations give it a salt-water flavour, and so we must needs say
that the coast begins there. True, it is but the Thames whose murky
waters lap the shore at Deptford; but the Thames here is the great
commercial “London River,” as seamen call it, the port to which
resorts a goodly proportion of the world’s shipping; and sea-going
vessels crowd the fairway at all hours of day and night.
Past Greenwich, Woolwich, and Erith the Thames goes in its
gradually broadening course, and at length comes to Gravesend.

Gravesend Reach is, and has always been, by general consensus of
opinion, the Sea-gate of London, and therefore, without any manner
of doubt, on the coast.
The length of the coast of Kent, reaching from Deptford, and
tracking round Sheppey and up the Medway estuary to Rochester,
and in and out of the queer places wherever the foreshore wends, I
make to be about one hundred and thirty-eight miles. It is—the
whole of it—extremely interesting, and in places grandly beautiful
and in others quietly pretty; and also along some other stretches,
scenically (but never historically) dull and drab. Below Gravesend,
round the Isle of Grain, and round Sheppey and the Swale to
Whitstable and Herne Bay, for instance, no one could perceive much
of nobility actually in that coast-line of London clay and of low,
muddy, or shingly foreshores. But where the chalk begins at
Westgate, and the sea, ceasing from washing the clay and receiving
the contaminations of the Thames and Medway, becomes more
cleanly, the coast, grows by degrees more striking.
As for the history that lies in the landings and embarkations, all
along the coast of Kent, why, there was never such another coast as
these storied shores. The fame of them begins at Gravesend, to
which those foreigners who did not by any chance land at Dover
generally came in the dangerous old days of the road between
Dover and London. At Faversham a king who sought secretly to
leave his kingdom was detained; at Ebbsfleet landed the Saxons
under Hengist and Horsa, and a hundred and fifty-seven years later
came to that same spot a Christian missioner who came missionising
very much against his own inclinations. At Deal, 1970 years ago—a
tolerably long stretch of time—a great personage set the fashion in
these numerous landings. I name Julius Cæsar, the noblest Roman
of them all, who, as far as history tells us, was the first of any
importance who ever burst into these unknown seas. Great
personages have been doing the like ever since. The reason for this
exceptional honour shown the Kentish coast, which has thus from
the earliest times been the Front Door of England, is quite easily
glimpsed on any sunny day anywhere between Deal and Folkestone,

in the gleaming coast of France, which reminds us that most of
those world-famous characters, in common with modern voyagers
across the Channel, disliked the sea, and crossed by the “shortest
route.”
For the rest, Dover has been the scene of comings and goings
uncountable, and to attempt recounting them would be wearisome
indeed. Charles the Second, who had lively experiences in a hunted
embarkation from our shores, experienced a welcome change in
1660, being received on his “glorious restoration” by his loyal
subjects on Dover beach, and in 1683 came ashore at what was at
that time “Bartholomew’s Gate,” in Thanet, which, in honour of that
act of kingly condescension, has ever since been called “Kingsgate.”
Kent, the Cantium, or country of the Cantii, mentioned by Julius
Cæsar B.C. 54, and by other ancient writers, is thought to take its
name from the peculiarity of its geographical position, jutting boldly
out (or, in other words, “canted out”) in an easterly direction,
beyond the estuary of the Thames. There is another view taken of
the origin of the word, a view which derives it from caint, the “open
country,” as distinguished from the woodland character of Sussex,
the ancient “Andredswald”; but, against this, it does not seem to be
sufficiently established that Kent ever was such an open country,
while the evidence of maps shows us that it does indeed project
most markedly.
The Kentish Coast, then, begins little more than two and a half
miles below London Bridge, the county boundary between Surrey
and Kent being placed at Earl’s Sluice, on the Grand Surrey Canal, in
Deptford, just beyond the Surrey Commercial Docks. There, where
the Royal Victualling Yard fronts the busy Thames, midway between
Limehouse Reach and Greenwich Reach, begin the 138 miles of this
strangely varied and exceptionally historic coast-line.
Undoubtedly the noblest and most fitting introduction is to
proceed down river by steamer to Greenwich, for that way you
perceive the greatness of the Port of London, and the majesty of the
commercial and maritime interests of the capital; while to come

“overland”—thus to dignify the approach by mean streets through
Bermondsey and Rotherhithe—is an effect of squalor.
Deptford of to-day is an integral part of London. Not an
ornamental part; indeed, no. Rather an industrial and wage-earning
place. One does not “reside” at Deptford, and there are not a few
who find it difficult even to live. It is thus not easy to associate it
with that “Depeford” of which Chaucer writes in his “Canterbury
Pilgrims,” in 1383: “Lo, Depeford, it is half-way prime.” The deep ford
whence it obtained its name is—or rather was—on the
Ravensbourne, or the Brome, as that stream has sometimes been
called, at the Broadway, on the Dover Road; but the many changes
that have taken place have of necessity abolished any possible
likeness to the passage that existed in Chaucer’s day. In any case,
the Deptford around the Broadway, the present bridge over the
Ravensbourne, and the road on to Blackheath is not the real
intimate Deptford. That is only to be found on the river side of
Evelyn Street, and in the neighbourhood of Creek Road, where the
Ravensbourne broadens out into Deptford Creek. Here is the real
Deptford; more especially along the winding old street oddly—and
with a curiously shipboard suggestion—named “Stowage,” and so to
the old original church of Deptford, dedicated, as it should be in a
waterside church, to St. Nicholas, the sailor’s patron.
From the church, Deptford Green leads to the waterside, and
adjoining is “Hughes’ Fields.” Pleasantly rural although these names
sound, candour compels the admission that they are, in fact, streets,
with no suggestion of grass or meadows about them. The church of
St. Nicholas dates from about 1697, and is a red-brick building in the
curious taste of that time; retaining, however, its old stone fifteenth-
century tower. Flourishing plane-trees render the churchyard in
summer not unpleasing, but the stranger is apt to see with a
shudder the grisly stone gate-piers, surmounted by great sculptured
skulls decoratively laurelled, as though Death were indeed the
conqueror and the hereafter merely a vain thought. You might travel
far, and yet find nothing so truly pagan.

DEPTFORD GREEN: ST. NICHOLAS’ CHURCH AND CHURCH-HOUSE.
Yet in this church is gathered much of Deptford’s olden story,
and in it are the memorials of captains and constructors of the Navy
in times when Deptford was much more of a dockyard and seaport
than a stirring quarter of London: monuments dating from before
the days of Charles the Second and Pepys. Here you shall find that
of Peter Pett, master shipwright in the King’s yard, who died in 1652.
The Latin epitaph upon this master craftsman quaintly describes him
as “a thoroughly just man, and the Noah of his generation.” It
further goes on to say that “he walked with God and brought to light
an invention even greater than that recorded of his prototype (for it
was an ark by which our mastery of the sea and our rights were
saved from shipwreck). He was called away from the tempests of
this world, God being his pilot, and his soul resting in the bosom of
his Saviour as in an ark of glory.” This seventeenth-century Noah and
inventive saviour of his country was the designer of the new frigate
type of ship, the Dreadnought of its day.
Here also is the monument of Captain George Shelvocke, who
thrice circumnavigated the globe, and died in 1742. The north side
of the church facing Deptford Green, which as already remarked is

not any longer a green, and cannot have been for some two
hundred years or more, forms a striking picture, for a group of red-
brick eighteenth-century buildings, built on to it, is obviously
associated with the church itself, although of absolutely domestic
character.
The great days of Deptford began in the reign of Henry the
Eighth, with the rise of the Royal Navy. It had been described as “a
mean fishing village” until the “King’s Yard,” as the dockyard was
named, was established in 1513—the first of our naval dockyards.
There the earliest ships of the Navy took the water; vessels with the
strange, and long since impossible, names of Jesus, Holy Ghost,
John Baptist, Great Nicholas, and the like: sacred names whose use
in such a connection would in our own days offend the ear with a
sense of blasphemy. The naming of ships in that manner went out of
fashion with the Reformation, and thereafter no English Holy Trinity
set forth to deal out death and destruction upon the high seas. It
was left to the Spaniards to couple holiness with conflict and
slaughter, and for such awful names as Madre de Dios, Sanctissima
Trinidad, and Espiritu Sancto to be associated with warfare.
The breach with Rome brought an entirely new order of names
into the Royal Navy of England, of which that of the Mary Rose was
for a time typical. But the domestic prettiness of love in a bower
pictured by such as this presently gave place to others, of the
robustious, defiant kind, such as the Revenge. It is true that there
was even another order, of which Sir Richard Hawkins’s Repentance
was representative. It marked the full swing of the religious feelings
of Englishmen from the idolatries of Rome to that sinners’ sense of
abasement under conviction of sin which was a feature of
Protestantism and the Puritan wave of thought.
It was in the year of the Armada that the Repentance took the
water at Deptford. One would dearly like to know exactly why
Hawkins gave his ship that name. Was he wrestling with the spirit,
or had he in his mind some conceit of bringing repentance home to
the Spaniards? The Elizabethan age was an age of ingenious

conceits, and this may well have been one of them. But the name
did not commend itself to Elizabeth when she was rowed from her
palace of Greenwich to see the new ship, lying off Deptford beautiful
in paint and gilding, and she renamed it the Dainty. Perhaps the
great Queen considered Repentance to be a singularly ill-chosen
name for a ship about to sail on a filibustering, piratical expedition.
It is curious to consider that the expedition was a disastrous failure,
and that a cynic dispensation of affairs thus mocked the original
choice of a name; just as it did that of Sir Richard Grenville’s
Revenge, three years later, when the fight went against the English,
and Grenville was killed and the Spaniards had their own revenge for
much.
Seven years before her visit to Sir Richard Hawkins’s ship,
Elizabeth had made a notable journey to Deptford, when she went
aboard Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, in which he had returned from
circumnavigating the world, dined there, and knighted him after
dinner.
Of all those ancient days and brave doings nothing remains. The
dockyard, although from time to time enlarged, and actually in
existence until 1869, is now but a memory, and the site of it is
occupied by the Foreign Cattle Market. It was the smallest of all the
dockyards, only thirty acres in extent; but it was the introduction of
ironclad ships, and the greater depth of water required that led to its
end, after a temporary closing between 1810 and 1844. The last
vessel launched was H.M.S. Druid, in 1869.
When the average person thinks of Deptford, historically, it is not
to Queen Elizabeth’s visits his mind reverts, nor even to Mr.
Secretary to the Admiralty Pepys, but rather to John Evelyn, to Sayes
Court, and Peter the Great. John Evelyn, later of Wotton, settled at
Deptford in 1651, at the mansion of Sayes Court, which had been
originally the manor-house of West Greenwich. Here he made
gardens and planted trees, the chief delight of his life. “I planted all
the out-limites of the gardens and long walks with holly,” he says, in
March 1683.

He was extremely proud of his holly-hedges:
“Is there under heaven a more glorious and refreshing object of
the kind than an impregnable hedge of about four hundred feet in
length, nine feet high and five in diameter, at any time of the year
glittering with its armed and varnished leaves? The taller standards
at orderly distances, blushing with their natural coral: it mocks the
rudest assaults of the weather, beasts, or hedge-breakers—Et ilium
nemo impune lacessit.”
No one, he thought, could insult a holly-hedge with impunity.
In 1665 he found Deptford a very desirable place of retreat from
the Great Plague of London. Later he let Sayes Court to Admiral
Benbow, who in January 1698 sublet it for three months to the “Czar
of Muscovy,” Peter the Great, who was as earnest then in planning a
navy for Russia as the German Emperor of our own times in building
a fleet for Germany. But the Czar himself worked as a shipwright in
the dockyard and filled Sayes Court with a semi-savage household.
His reputed chief amusement, that of continually wheeling a
wheelbarrow through Evelyn’s cherished hedges, is perhaps the
most vivid item of information about Peter the Great in the average
Englishman’s mind: something of an injustice to the memory of that
constructive autocrat, whose greatness was not built upon such
eccentricities.
The generally received account of the Czar’s way with the
hedges is that he trundled wheelbarrows through them; but it would
appear that he was seated in the barrow, and that some one else
did the wheeling.
Three months of “his Zarrish Majestie” and suite sufficed to very
nearly wreck Sayes Court and its gardens. Benbow and Evelyn
claimed compensation from the Treasury for the damage, and the
Treasury, considering that the Czar was the guest of William the
Third in this country, admitted the liability and deputed Sir
Christopher Wren to make a return. The document is still in

existence. Among other items of dilapidations by that riotous tartaric
company are:
£ s. d.
New floore to a Bogg House 0 10 0
300 Squares in the Windows 0 15 0
All the floores dammag’d by Grease Inck 2 0 0
For 3 wheelbarrows broke Lost 1 0 0
The total amount awarded by Treasury warrant of June 21st,
1698, was £350 9s. 6d., of which £162 7s. went to Evelyn.
Sayes Court was almost wholly demolished in 1728, and the
remainder converted into a workhouse. A plot of ground of fourteen
acres, a portion of the old gardens, was secured in 1877 by Mr. W. J.
Evelyn of Wotton, and converted into a public recreation ground.
The Evelyns still own considerable property here, and although Court
and gardens be gone, the historic sense is strong, and Evelyn Street,
Czar Street, and Sayes Court Street, neighbour thoroughfares named
after the Armada, Blake, and Wellington, and curiously contrast with
the unimaginative “Mary Anne Buildings.” It is, however, only right to
say that the streets that remind one of those historic people and
that old mansion are as squalid as the buildings that honour Mary
Anne.
Across the bridge that spans Deptford Creek, amid the
surroundings of canals and wharves, you come into Greenwich. The
Frenchman of the story illustrating the vagaries of English
pronunciation, uncertain whether he wanted “Greenwich or
Woolwich, he didn’t know which,” and pronouncing the place and
names as spelled, was to be excused: how could he know it was
“Grinnidge” and “Woolidge”? And how many Englishmen can speak
the name of Rennes properly after the French use?

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