Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Yuval Keshtcher “My super power within my teams is being able to bring empathy to the foreground of our efforts.” Chris Cameron

Hey! I’m Chris Cameron and I’m a Senior UX Copywriter at Booking.com. I work with a handful of product teams which are part of a larger group focusing on the main Booking.com customer flow of searching for, choosing and booking a place to stay via our website and apps.

I’m originally from the U.S. (Boston and Phoenix were my homes) but moved to Amsterdam in 2010.

Something most people don’t know about me is I began my studies as a music major. I played the drums since age 10 and had lofty goals of playing percussion in a symphony orchestra before ultimately deciding to change career paths.

In one single word what does microcopy mean to you?

Clarity. Above all, clarity is the most important quality UX writing can have. We need to guide our users through their experience, and the moment that experience lacks clarity, we’ve lost them.

How did you get into UX writing?

After I completed a degree in journalism I eventually joined a small tech startup in a role they called “Web Producer”.

The role was a lot of things, writing blogposts, emails and press releases, making videos, taking photographs — but I was also writing copy for the website and the products the company was building.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my introduction to UX writing, though it was only a portion of my work at the time. In 2016 I moved over to Booking.com where UX writing is now my sole focus.

Where do you find inspiration for the projects you are working on?

Aside from the great examples I see out in the world from other writers doing amazing work, I am lucky to be able to find inspiration from my colleagues at Booking.com.

We have a large team of writers (over 50 UX writers currently), each with their own areas of expertise within the company, and our community is quick to share inspiring examples and offer helpful suggestions.

But first and foremost, our greatest source of inspiration comes from our customers and partners (depending on who we are writing for).

We work closely with researchers to identify pain points, which inspires us to craft copy that alleviates these issues and solves problems for our users.

What does your UX writing process look like?

Like the other UX writers at Booking.com, I work with a handful of product teams composed of developers, designers, product owners, data scientists, and more.

When we have a task to tackle or an idea to explore, I’ll get together with a designer and we’ll talk about how we want to approach the solution from a design and copy perspective.

If need be, I can consult with other writers who may have worked on similar use cases for any learnings we might already have.

Once I’ve written and we’ve settled on the copy we want to use, my next step is to create a quick summary of everything for our in-house language teams.

Everything we write at Booking.com is localized into 42 other languages and dialects — all usually in no more than 24 hours. From there our developers take over, making our design and copy come to life. And then we put it to the test.

We A/B test everything, showing our new copy/design to half of our users and measuring the impact.

This could be almost anything: whether those users were more likely to click something, whether they went on to make a booking with us, and even if they later on were more likely to cancel that reservation or contact customer service. By allowing the test to run for a few weeks, we’re able to measure some of these knock-on effects. Then we need to analyze the results — maybe our new copy helped more people make a booking, but later on they needed to contact customer service. Is that good?

From a UX writing perspective, all of this testing is incredibly valuable. Whether our copy is “successful” or not, we’re always able to learn something about the words we write.

In this example, maybe something was left unclear to the user causing them to need help from customer service. These things tell us when our writing needs improvement, and helps us refine and come up with the best possible solution. Multiply this by the dozens of tests any UX writer is involved at any time, and we’re quickly able to gather new learnings.

What is your method for finding Booking.com’s brand voice?

Having a consistent tone of voice is definitely a challenge at a company as large as Booking.com, and it’s super important.

Recently we put a large effort into creating principles for copy that can span the business, not just for the UX writers in the tech department.

They serve as a guide so we can be “Booking.com” no matter where a customer encounters our writing.

Please have a look at this post on our Booking.writes blog to learn more about our copy principles and tone of voice.

As a writer in a product team, what is your super power?

Aside from the ability (the need, really) to manage and prioritize work from several teams at once, my greatest power as a writer is empathy.

Without words, our products would be faceless shapes with no mood, no tone of voice. UX writers have the duty to not only write responsibly, but also to understand how a user is feeling and what their needs are while interacting with our products.

So for me, my super power within my teams is being able to bring empathy to the foreground of our efforts.

Do you think that UX writing would allow more writers to enter the tech industry? How?

Definitely. The opportunities for UX writing in the tech industry are only just beginning to take off. The idea of writing as a skill on par with design and development is still gaining momentum, and more companies are starting to understand its value. We may have over 50 UX writers in tech at Booking.com, but we are still playing catch-up with a tech department that rapidly expanded. We could easily have over 100 people and still feel like we are behind when compared to design and development. There certainly aren’t enough UX writers in tech as a whole, but that means there are lots of opportunities for writers to break into the industry. By the way, we are hiring!

3 useful tips for people that want to get into the field of UX writing?

1. Expand your skill-set as much as you can. You don’t need to be genius with code or have expert design skills, but being familiar with the basics principles of these areas and being able to “speak the language” can go a long way to helping you slot in with a tech team. Having experience in an agile tech/development work environment is a huge plus when getting into UX writing.

2. Learn another language. Okay, maybe that’s overstating it, but these days it’s less likely that your users are all from one region or speak one language. It’s not enough to simply write in your native language and send it off for translation — you need to consider from the start how localization can impact both the words you choose to write and the way your users experience them. Some languages read right-to-left — has your designer prepared to mirror the page layout? Other languages lack direct translations for otherwise simple words in English — is your copy going to fall out of that button in Bulgarian? Throw variables and numbers into the mix and things get nasty fast. The more you’re aware of these potential issues, the better.

3. Know the impact of your writing. What I mean is more than just considering your audience or the potential benefits of what you work on. I’m talking about being able to measure your successes and knowing what you need to measure. If you’re writing a landing page or CTA, how do you measure the success of the copy you wrote? Time on page? Clickthroughs? Conversion?

It can be tough to measure depending on resources, but you should try to connect your writing to impact on user outcomes.

More people may have clicked your CTA, but in the end what impact did it have?

Just for fun, give us your fave microcopy example?

It’s probably a cliché at this point but I’ve always been a fan of Mailchimp’s writing, along with some other well known examples like Slack and Dropbox. But when I used Mailchimp day-to-day in my previous job, I was constantly delighted and inspired by the tone and brand they had managed to develop for themselves.

How can you not love it when they turn a boring duplicate username error into something fun and inspiring?

That’s it for today!

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Interview With A Senior UX Writer From Booking.com was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview With A Senior UX Writer From Booking.com

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