Freja Nilsson, Digital communications consultant:
UX design as a practice has been around for a long time. When office computers became common in the early 1990s, designers began to take user experience into account. In 1995 Donald Norman coined the term User Experience Design to cover all aspects of the person's experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. Something that wasn't covered in this definition was the texts found in the system, which contribute to the user experience just as much as the design.
The term UX writing has gained increased legitimacy in recent years, and we predict that it will only gain increased importance in 2023.
UX writing is about writing information in a way that considers the user's needs and behaviours. This includes structuring, formatting, simplifying the message and understanding how people read online. This is especially important in corporate communication, where information tends to be both complex and detailed.
UX writing trends in 2023:
- Rising demand for UX writers and services: As companies realise that UX writing is essential, more and more companies hire dedicated UX writers or use UX writing services.
- New UX-writing tools: As the field is growing, so is the number of UX-writing tools. The design tool Figma has released both a writing toolkit and a spell checker to help designers write. AI tools such as ChatGPT and copy.ai will also help writers set the tone and write faster with fewer errors.
- Ensure UX writing when translating: As many companies are global and present in many markets, companies need to make sure that the translations follow the same standards as the texts in the website's primary language. We often see error messages, 404 pages and notifications not being translated at all or in a way that is hard to understand.
Scepticism towards inauthentic content
Also Freja Nilsson:
A trend that we have been noticing for some time is the increased scepticism among stakeholders towards company communication that is perceived as inauthentic and too "branded". We wrote about this in relation to employer branding in our articles "How to create trustworthy employer branding" and "TikTok + Employer Branding = True?".
This is a trend that we predict will become even stronger in 2023. A study from Label Insight showed that 94% of the respondents would stay loyal to a brand they perceive to be transparent and genuine.
Many large corporations fall into the trap of having a very streamlined and distant way of communicating, which will not gain the trust of investors, jobseekers and other stakeholders in 2023. Work with finding your true company purpose and adapt your tone of voice, content design and overall strategy to that.