“Can you take a quick look at this?”

“What should I write here?”

“Why weren’t you at the kick-off yesterday?”

If you are a UX Writer or Content Designer, you may get asked this kind of questions quite a lot. No matter if you are part of a squad or if you are on many topics transversally: from day 1, you should make sure that Product Designers will be your best work buddies.

Here are my 9 tips to improve your UX Writer/Product Designer collaboration:

1. Get to know your Product Designers
2. Become an integral part of their existing workflow
3. Establish new adapted rituals
4. Talk their language
5. Add content guidelines in the Design System
6. Showcase your expertise
7. Hold collaboration retrospectives
8. Compare your collaboration with other UX Writers
9. Standardize your collaboration

Get to know your Product Designers

Before even starting talking about collaboration, organize a 1:1 meeting to better understand their background and workflow. Do they know what UX Writing is? Have they already worked with a UX Writer? Do they have an appetite for UX Writing topics and methodologies? Depending on their answer, you will adapt your way of collaborating with each and every one of them.

Become an integral part of their existing workflow

To make the collaboration smoother, you should become an integral part of already existing processes and rituals and demonstrate to other stakeholders how you can contribute. Make room in your agenda to participate in domain workshops, feature team weeklies and user research sessions. If you’re not invited to these meetings, find out who has organized them and explain why you should be in the room too.

“Chiara’s work became an essential part for me in my designing process. She contributes by focusing on the wording to enhance the UX and it’s great someone can take care of that. She demonstrates the above points by being flexible and learning about the use-case before she starts to work on the copy and it’s very open to discussion, which shows she is 100% user-centric.” — Product Designer

Establish new adapted rituals

Set up weekly meetings of a minimum of 15 minutes to talk about your individual priorities and schedule any additional jam sessions to work together. If possible, make your agenda, your to-do and your Figma files accessible to your Product Designers (and vice versa) to let them see what you are working on at all times.

Talk their language

If you want to sit at the table as a designer, become a real designer. Especially if you’re new to this field, take notes of terms you don’t know, listen to discussions among Product Designers, and ask questions. Design systems are a gold mine to understand terminology and component behavior, and to be an integral part of exchanges and debates.

Add content guidelines in the Design System

If you want Product Designers to benefit from your expertise, you need to write content in a way and in a place that corresponds to their mental system and to their habits. Many design systems have a section devoted entirely to content, but it’s not enough. Write content guidelines directly in component pages to make people see that UX Writing needs Product Design and vice versa.

Showcase your expertise

Since you work with words, your work is constantly challenged. That’s great, because feedback is a gift. But as a UX Writer, show your peers that you are a designer, not an artist: make it crystal clear that you are not following your gut feeling, but that all your decisions are made thanks to a clear rationale. Always justify your choices in Figma comments, in group conversations or in meetings. Also, keep track of your iterations to show your workflow.

Hold collaboration retrospectives

Retrospectives allow you to better understand your team’s needs and pain points. Also, they may become an important support when discussing UX Writing resources. In addition to retrospectives, also favor 1:1 sessions or ask your Product Designers to fill out forms (anonymously or not).

Compare your collaboration with other UX Writers

If you have the chance of being part of a UX Writing/ Content Design team, openly discuss your collaboration with Product Designers with your peers. Although each duo certainly has its own particularities, try to figure out together what works better and to have a uniform process within the UX Writing team. In doing so, neither of you has to reinvent the wheel, and it will be easier to present existing processes to newcomers to the UX Writing team.

Standardize collaboration

If projects pile up, the quality of your work will be diminished, as will its impact. Establish a detailed collaboration framework to let your Product Designers when and how you will collaborate on their projects. Make it easier for them to understand when to include you and what are your priorities.

Conclusions

I decided to write this article after 6 months of tight collaboration within the Patient Health Platform feature teams at Doctolib.

During this period, I ended up with these 9 tips thanks to trial and error methods, but I am refining my collaboration with Product Designers every day to make sure we find the right balance. But “it’s just the beginning”, isn’t it?

Still, open communication has been the most important factor that has helped us through these new workflow and collaboration methods.

What are your tips to a successful UX Writer/Product Designer collaboration?

Thanks to Gaëlle Malenfant for her illustration.

Thanks to Chloé Thibaux, Hannah Sheeran and Michael Winnington for their ideas and support.

Thanks to my fellow Product Designers for having reviewed this article.

Thanks to the 4th year students at EEMI for having challenged this article with their fresh eyes.