When people hear the words ‘user experience design,’ writing isn’t likely the first thing that pops into their head. Yet, writing is an inevitable and integral part of designing any digital project.
Content Strategist and writer, Scott Kubie has written a book that will serve as a companion to guide its readers through the writing process for design projects. Kubie’s 60-some page e-book, “Writing for Designers,” will be available October 16 as part of the Briefs series from A Book Apart, a publishing company that publishes books for people who design, write and code.
Kubie first got started in design writing with a company called BitMethod in Des Moines in 2009.
“The IOS app store had just launched and it was this big exciting thing. Everyone and their brother had an idea for an app,” Kubie said. “This book encapsulates everything I wish I would’ve had in place to tell them before I took that job. It would’ve made my life easier.”
Kubie now lives Minneapolis, where he works as the lead content strategist at Brain Traffic.
“There’s often a lot more writing that needs to be done for a design than one would imagine or would anticipate,” Kubie said.
For any given page in an app, you might need be showing five or six different messages based on all of the potential variables of the person reading the message.
“It seems straightforward, but when you get underneath it, there might be ten, fifteen, twenty different strings of text that someone has to write to support all those different situations.”
Kubie says writing within a design context comes with constraints that aren’t as persistent in other forms of writing such as character counts, design concepts that underpin the app and screen size, just to name a few.
“You don’t want it be saying ‘sign in’ in one place and ‘log in’ in another place,” Kubie said. “And you can’t put that much information on a screen so the importance of every individual word is amplified that much more. There’s a lot less room for error.”
Click here to learn more about the book.