Torrey Podmajersky
UX Writer at GoogleTorrey Podmajersky uses her experience doing UX writing and content strategy for Xbox, Microsoft education, OfferUp, and now Google, to help her create great experiences with and for a broad range of people.
She has a Bachelor's degree in Physics and a Masters in Curriculum Instruction, and has done freelance fiction writing, home health care work, high-power rocketry, marketing communications, high-school science teaching, and 9 years of UX writing.
Her best-selling book Strategic Writing for UX was published by O'Reilly Media in mid-2019.
Strategic Writing for UX
Until now, most of us haven’t had a robust system to make our words work as hard as they can to drive engagement, conversion, and retention. The content can be as consistent as the navigational elements, and convey the brand as clearly as the color palette. The words can align with customer goals and business priorities from the beginning, meet heuristic usability goals, and make a measurable impact.
In this workshop, Torrey Podmajersky will lead you through the system of scoring the usability and voice of UX that she shared in her best-selling book Strategic Writing for UX. You’ll learn how to use usability principles and a voice chart to find where the words in an experience are getting in the way of meeting its own goals. Then, you’ll get hands-on practice making targeted improvements to the UX text and using your “score sheet” to make it better. Finally, you’ll prepare a plan to engage your stakeholders and build enthusiasm for doing the work to improve the experience.
Come to this workshop to use voice and usability criteria to heuristically score existing UX text, then rewrite, re-score the text, and prepare to communicate the update plan with stakeholders.
Takeaways
- A reusable score sheet for your own UX text audits
- Practical experience measuring and re-drafting UX text
- A process to build stakeholder enthusiasm for UX text improvements
Prioritizing UX Content Work
Now that our organizations believe that UX writing matters, there’s too much work to do! Use the Eisenhower Matrix to sort common UX content tasks by importance and urgency, and allow the business to recognize the pain that happens when there aren’t enough content people.
Good news: Our organizations have started to realize the powerful impact UX writers can make to meet our organizations’ goals! The bad news, unfortunately, is that there aren’t enough of us. UX writers are asked to fix existing experiences, design new features, write emergency error messages, consult on brand frameworks, unveil their content strategy, and protect the organization from liability -- all before lunch, some days. In this presentation, Torrey Podmajersky will lead you through the prioritization matrix she introduces in her book Strategic Writing for UX (O’Reilly, 2019).
