Writing Down the Design
The ROI of UX Writing
In the late summer of 2017, I began consistently writing about UX design and related topics. In those two years, I authored 54 articles on Medium. My average word count for an article is 2,500 — a conservative estimate since the articles often far exceed this measurement. This equates to 135,000 words over the past couple of years. I have, in truth, written far more that was either published elsewhere or not currently published at all. To put this in perspective, a shorter novel can weigh in at around 70,000 words.
My initial motivation to write consistently was twofold. First, I wanted to run an experiment to simply determine whether I could develop a routine habit of writing and publishing on a set schedule. I could, of course, had done this without publishing anything. However, publishing something and sending it out into the world on a set schedule held my feet to the fire as I promoted each article I would write.
My second motivation complimented the first. I wanted to see if the writing could lead to something. I didn’t know what that something was when I started. I thought I could, perhaps, establish my voice in a given community of professionals. Or, I supposed my writing could lead to the discovery of a book topic on the UX profession. I didn’t really know where any of it would go or whether anything would come of it at all. What I did know was that I had something to say and in two years have never wanted for a topic.
As I wrote, I came to understand I had a third and much stronger motivation. I possessed a burning desire to create. Writing, unlike design, was one area of my life where I could have complete control over the final outcome. Thus, writing became an outlet for my creative energies.
I began to think of this experiment as “writing down the design.” I thought of it this way because I was simply documenting my own experiences in user experience design and reflecting on them. Some of my pieces were perhaps a bit too philosophical. But I just let the writing take me where it wanted to go.
So, I wrote and I wrote. And, I wrote some more. I didn’t waste a lot of time on statistics or how many people were reading my work. I didn’t even do much promotion aside from sending out a single Twitter link and posting the article on LinkedIn. I also ignored most of the “sound advice” you’ll find on writing for the web.
I didn’t and still don’t write very many how-to articles. I don’t write flashy headlines (i.e. clickbait) or attempt to capitalize on trendy subjects or write the fluff content (i.e. top 10 UX books you must read). I didn’t worry about word-count and I still don’t. I write what I have to say, edit it down occasionally but generally feel an article doesn’t have to fit into a predefined word count. If the content is solid, the word count won’t matter. And if people won’t read a long article despite solid content, then they just won’t read mine.
There’s no egotism around this philosophy. It isn’t as though I feel I am above any sort of rules regarding length or the type of content or writing headlines that are “hooks.” It’s simply that I wanted the writing and the ideas to stand on their own accord. Moreover, I wasn’t measuring my success by the number of clicks an article received or any number. The measure of my success was simple — writing and publishing routinely.
I did that for over a year. I had only, up until the late summer of 2017, sporadically written and published. And then the writing started to gain some traction — not much, but some. It took much longer to build any real momentum.
It started with an older article being cited in Wikipedia. Then, Medium bought one of my articles a year after I had published it. Shortly thereafter, a few major publications such as UX Collective and Prototypr.io reached out and asked me to submit my work. But this was all a very slow burn and happened over years, not months.
All of this was encouraging. But had any of these elements been a primary motivation for me, I don’t think I would have been able to sustain my efforts for years to achieve these ends. Even today, I think it is nice when Medium picks up one of my stories. But it isn’t any sort of goal for me.
People contact me often as a result of my articles or the exposure they receive. They often state they would like to write more or they should write more. I am not sure what their motivations are. But they lament not having the time or the ideas or the devotion.
When we think of writing and writers in relation to the motivations, there are a few primary culprits that come to mind. People may write because they seek fame. Fame, of course, is little more than a form of vanity. Another motivation might be money. And a final culprit could be professional standing. In academics, for example, “publish or perish” is a common idiom.
Fame, money, professional standing. I suppose all of these crossed my mind at some point along my journey. But those are very extrinsic motivations and such motivations are rarely sustainable over the long haul.
You might be one of the lucky few who find fame in writing. This obviously depends on how you define fame. It also largely depends on the content you write. I don’t think there are too many famous UX writers and never spent time entertaining this idea.
Even the most famous writers can fade into obscurity without repeated success (save for authors such as J.D. Salinger who developed cult-like followings and greater fame as the result of not repeating their success). Fame is a roller coaster. Billy Joel aptly sums it up in his song, “The Entertainer,”
I am the entertainer
And I know just where I stand
Another serenader
And another long haired band
Today I am your champion
I may have won your hearts
But I know the game, you’ll forget my name
And I won’t be here in another year
If I don’t stay on the charts
Earlier this year, I received a text from a colleague who is now living and working in another state. She told me her boss had just come by her desk telling her about this article she just had to read. After discussing the article with her boss a bit more, she realized the author was me and had sent a text stating, “You’re famous.”
I immediately felt uncomfortable with that statement. The article was “The McDonaldization of UX” and it is, by far, the most popular article I have written to date. It also prompted emails, comments and contacts that were mostly positive, but a few that were either negative or outright strange.
More than a few people have come across my writings and wanted to recruit me for some position they had open. I fell down this rabbit hole once, but have since come to the realization that the ability to author an interesting piece does not necessarily equate to a good employment match.
If you are consistent in your writing and have a knack for the craft, it is likely you’ll acquire some amount of modest fame in the process. You may even scale beyond modest fame. However, I believe it is overrated and not a sustainable motivation at the outset of such an endeavor.
Money, being closely related to fame, is an even less likely sustainable motivation. If writing were a great source of wealth, every college and university in the world would have a waitlist for English majors. MFA programs wouldn’t need to recruit and bookstores would be brimming with freshly printed monographs authored by future Hemingways.
I’ve made approximately two-thousand dollars in the past few years through writing. Most of that has been a direct result of Medium’s Partner Program. It’s nice to get a few bucks here and there. But writing will likely never pay my rent. In short, you aren’t likely to break the bank through writing.
Most writers with any talent for the craft can see an increase in their professional standing. But this is limited and highly dependent on what you do with the content you create. I have managed to create a very interesting network as a result of my writing endeavors. I have also used my written content to formulate presentation material for national conferences I attend and present at. There is also the intrinsic value of what I learn through this process.
But all of this work has not landed me a new job. I haven’t become an esteemed member of the UX elite, sharing the ranks with people such as Donald Norman or Jared Spool. People aren’t routinely knocking on my door. These were never my intentions. I have learned a lot more about my profession and built a nice network of fellow designers. (Neither of those were my intentions either, but they’re a nice side benefit.)
Had I began writing with the external motivations of fame, money or professional standing, I doubt I would have written as much as I have. My motivation would have fizzled because these are superficial ideals. Consider, for example, if you decide you’re going to start going to the gym on a routine basis. In one scenario, you could have the motivation of losing 30 pounds. In another scenario, your motivation might be feeling better as a result of regularly moving your body. The latter scenario will likely win out. Losing 30 pounds will take a considerably long time and when you don’t see immediate results, your motivation will fizzle. Feeling better, however, occurs almost immediately after beginning an exercise program (once you get through the initial soreness). It’s a sustainable motivation because the results appear quickly.
My motivation to write was to develop a routine habit. When I saw the words filling up on the page and the articles stacking up, I could measure the results easily and was motivated to keep writing. My other motivation was more exploratory, wanting to see where the writing might lead. It led in many directions — none of which I could have predicted.
It led to ideas and concepts — ideas and concepts I didn’t know I had, but that emerged from the writing process. It led to an idea exchange where readers and co-workers would bounce their own ideas off of me, forcing me to think more deeply about some position I was holding. Most important, it led to a connection between my life and other lives.
When I started this writing journey, I never thought I would gain close to 3,000 followers on the Medium platform or as many connections and followers as I currently have on LinkedIn. I suppose for a while I got wrapped around the axle on those metrics. But it’s really just another extrinsic motivation and it doesn’t mean anything unless some of those people connect with you in some meaningful way. They did.
I have received countless messages from various channels. People reach out to me, telling me how much a particular piece of writing meant to them or how it helped them or how it expressed some issue they were struggling with. Of course, you can easily fall into a confirmation bias trap by weighting these responses too heavily. But I was less flattered they were enamored with some article and more flattered that I had made some impact on a life I didn’t even know existed until I began this experiment.
Some readers influenced my thinking. Their comments would force me to think about something differently and see the grey areas versus the black and white. Many readers would share their own experiences with me and I found this to be the most treasured of interactions. These were gifts — the products of me attempting to put my emotions on a page.
In “Confessions of a UX Designer” and “The McDonaldization of UX Design,” I was merely expressing concepts I was struggling through in my own career. “A Tale of Two UX Teams” was autobiographical, painting a portrait of the worst leader I had ever worked with and for. My writings on healthcare UX were designed to fill a niche since it is a topic not often covered. I have even written of my best little design buddy, Cody, and his impending demise — a loss I am still grieving nearly a year later. Some of these pieces received responses. They touched people’s lives. And I didn’t expect that.
The funny thing about all of this is how blind we are in our creative efforts. The pieces that readers gravitated to weren’t the ones I liked the most. I thought “The McDonaldization of UX Design” and “A Tale of Two UX Teams” were just so-so articles. “Confessions of a UX Designer” was just me pissed off. But readers seemed to love each of these pieces. The pieces I really liked and the ones I enjoyed writing the most fizzled like a wet firecracker. They flopped.
I laughed out while writing “Down the rabbit hole — UX adventures in Wonderland,” enjoying subtle and not-so-subtle crossovers with Lewis Carroll’s work. I enjoyed writing “UX Leadership — Marine Corps Style,” applying styles from one very different profession to another. Neither article received much exposure. To date, there is one comment between the two articles. What resonates with me does not necessarily resonate with readers. But I find this more interesting than dissuading and still write, not for the numbers of clicks, but for the joy of creating something.
This is also interesting in another light. The majority of an artist’s work becomes somewhat obscure. Singers, writers, painters and the like all have greatest hits. But the majority of their work remains obscure. Not every piece of work is a greatest hit.
In the process of all this writing, I have developed enough content for a book. The ideas and concepts I have developed over the past few years could easily fill three books. I have begun the first. This effort obviously means I will publish less on Medium but will be working on something with an even greater impact.
Sure, I could have written the “fluff pieces” or the how-to articles or one of those top 10 list articles that are extremely biased and based on one person’s point of view. And I probably have written a few of them. But those weren’t the pieces people gravitated to. People identified with the more philosophical pieces — the ones where I shared a glimpse of my true self and my own struggles as a designer.
We all have something of value within us. It is just a matter of mining the depths to find the gems. They say there’s a story in everyone’s life. I would wager there is more than one story in every life. But it takes some work, some archeology, to find those stories, dust them off, polish them and share them with the world.
We all love a good story. We love the main character who conquers and overcomes great odds. We also love the Greek tragedies where a single weakness leads to the main character’s fall. I have lived both of those stories and shared much of them.
It hasn’t always been comfortable to share so much of myself and my career. But somewhere along the journey, I realized I was helping others in sharing my own triumphs and failures. Ironically, I think my greatest failure over the past few years of writing has been not sharing more of my failures.
It has been an interesting journey and I will keep writing down the design — but not for the reasons that initially motivated me. I have already developed the habit and have realized I don’t care where the writing leads. I’ll keep writing because I know someone will come upon these words at some point in time and it will help them.
I’ll keep writing and publishing in hopes of touching lives through my own life.
