Yael Ben-David
UX writers and other design professionals are famously, and correctly, user-centered.
Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers can sometimes benefit from slight course corrections to better account for the business side of our work.
Her new book, "The Business of UX Writing," makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs.
We talked about:
the origin story behind her new book, "The Business of UX Writing"
the lack of clear pathways into the UX writing field
how her background in neurobiology helped make her equally interested in quantitative and qualitative measurements
the need for UX writers to course-correct on how we balance user concerns and business goals
examples of how to balance user needs and business goals
how to think about and measure the ROI (return on investment) of UX writing
her KAPOW framework for measuring content ROI
the importance of listening in stakeholder interactions and in speaking their language
the importance of the O in KAPOW - owning your metrics - which you can do even if you're not good at math
the correct answer to your "Who am I to write a book?" question: "Who are you NOT to write a book"
Yael's bio
Yael is a UX writer who specializes in complex products. She has written health, financial, and other products used by more than 100 million people around the world. After a BA in journalism at New York University and MSc and PhD in neurobiology at The Hebrew University, Yael discovered her passion for making innovative tech accessible to mass markets through clear, helpful, data-driven microcopy. She also bakes outrageous birthday cakes.
Connect with Yael online
YaelBenDavid.me
LinkedIn
Twitter
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjQGATTGlFg
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 130. Content strategy is fundamentally about balancing your users' needs with your organization's business goals. UX design is a famously user-centered profession. Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers and other design professionals sometimes need to course-correct to better account for the business side of our work. Her new book, "The Business of UX Writing," makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs.
Interview transcript
Larry:
All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 130 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Yael Ben-David. Yael is a really well-known UX writer. If you're in the field at all, you've probably come across here at a conference or in the conversation somewhere online. But I'm really excited to have her on today because we're scheduling this podcast so that this episode should drop the day her new book comes out, and her book is called The Business of UX Writing. So, welcome, Yael. Tell the folks a little bit more about the book and how it came to be.
Yael:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to, right at launch, be sharing this episode. The book is, like you said, called The Business of UX Writing, and it basically became about because I started talking a while back and thinking about the ROI, the return on investment of UX writing. So, really, what is the impact on the business and not just on the user? The more I thought about it and wrote about it and spoke about it, the more I realized I had to say and was getting asked questions about it and was actually one of the first people in the field I think really make noise about it, and eventually, it shaped up into a book, which I... Since then, many more have fallen down this rabbit hole with me, and there are more talks about it, which is fantastic. I don't find it repetitive at all. I think anyone working in this field and using a data-centered approach is going to have contributions to make and the more voices, the better. So, I'm really glad though that the A Book Apart is publishing this and that it's joining the ranks of a more mainstream niche within the field.
Larry:
I love that, and when you just mentioned the data-centricness of it, and one of the things, it's pretty late in the book, I forget when you mentioned it, but to me, it was kind like, "Oh man, I wish I'd known this sooner," but you were a neurobiologist or what was your field again for 10 years?
Yael:
Yeah, so I was a neurobiologist for 10 years, and I think that a lot of the ways we approach research in neurobiology have informed my UX writing practice, believe it or not. I love that about UX writers. I love that they come from every walk of life, and part of that is because there is no clear path to UX writing. Not yet anyway. I just started actually teaching a college course in UX writing at the university, and that to me was very much one small step for Yael Ben-David and one giant leap for the discipline, that it's finally making its way into mainstream academia. But in large part, there's no clear way in like a lawyer goes to law school, which means that people are coming in from all over, and I think that just benefits the product, and as excited as I am that it's becoming a recognized field and it is joining mainstream education, it's also concerns me because I want to make sure that we don't get people in who haven't had, or don't get only people in, who haven't had other experiences that they can bring and other perspectives, but I digress. We were talking about oh-
Larry:
Yeah, but I think part of my intent in asking that about that is that most, like you said, the lack of a clear path in. I think it's safe to say most UX writers and content designers come from some kind of writing background like journalism, copywriting, something like that, and they're media-savvy and data sensitive, I think, but you were data immersed in here in a scientific field for a while. Do you think that's part of where you have become so interested in the quantification of our work?
Yael:
Yes, and this might surprise people from outside the sciences, but I feel equally as strongly about quantitative and qualitative measurements because of my neurobiology practice, and it's not all just about numbers because the numbers, statistics can be misinterpreted regardless of how hard you think the hard science is. It's the same in UX writing whether you're talking about click-through rates or open rates or whatever it is, or whether in biology, you're talking about anything that you're measuring, the quantitative data on its own. It just doesn't tell the story. It tells the what, but not the why, and without looking at the bigger picture and using mixed methods and really having a robust perspective in both fields, you can't glean anything meaningful from the data. So, it might not be intuitive, but yeah, in neuroscience, I also really experienced that needing a bigger picture, not being able to look at a certain experiment or a certain paper in isolation, and I definitely bring a lot of that. Actually, A Book Apart, one of the editors, kept catching sort of sciencey phrases and having me take them out. So, sometimes, the lines in the careers blur, but I think they caught them all.
Larry:
No, but I think it was a really nifty surprise to me that it came up so late in the book because I never would've guessed that, but in retrospect, all of the... and I love that it's not just quantitative, that it's qualitative. It's a balanced mixed methods of... When you talk, I think was it chapter four, when you talk about measurement and showing results that you survey all the different ways you can measure stuff and it's a really good blend of qualitative and quantitative things.
Larry:
Hey, but I want to make sure, because I feel like I'm burying the lead here as we say in journalism. The thing that just grabbed me the most about this book is you have make a pretty strong call to action - to use lingo from our profession - that basically there was this one passage in the book where you say that we need to do some course correcting about the all-encompassing user centeredness of UX writing, and it gets back to this data-driven approach that that hints at the business side of things, which is what the book is all about, and balancing that with the human-centered design part of it. Can you talk a little bit about that how you came to focus on that?
Yael:
Yeah, sure. Definitely. I think that somewhere along the line, the idea that the business and the user are partners and should be collaborators towards shared goals got lost, and I understand why. I don't think anyone's to blame. I think we got extreme because we had to. So, let me back up, and basically the first chapter, a short biography of UX writing walks through the history of how I think we got to where we are today, and basically, for a long time, there was no consideration of the user. Software was being put out that just users had to speak computer. Computer didn't speak human and too bad. That's just the way it is. So, when user experience started to become a discipline, even before it had a name, all of us in that field were working to represent the user, to advocate for the user, and it was really, really needed, and we had to be almost aggressive because nobody else was doing it, and we had to empower them when they had to be represented.
Yael:
So, we went all out and that's fine and that's great and that's what was needed at the time, but the whole movement was very reactionary. It was very like here's wrong. Here's what we need to fix, and it was a very like early... I almost think of it as back when as a discipline, we were toddlers throwing tantrums, and that was behaviorally expected for where we were in our development, but I believe we've matured past that and we've advocated for the users,
