In this episode of Writers in Tech, Yuval Keshtcher, CEO of UX Writing Hub, interviews Amanda Bridge, a senior content designer at HubSpot. Amanda shares her inspiring journey into UX writing, discusses challenges in building a UX writing discipline, and highlights the importance of human touch in content design. The conversation explores AI's impact on UX writing, introduces AI writing tools like Writer's Figma plugin, and emphasizes the benefits of being embedded in product teams. The theme "Advocating for Your UX Content" inspires content designers to promote their craft within their organizations.
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00:00
But then we as content designers, can work on, in my opinion, the really fun stuff, which is what is the conversation that's happening in this feature? Is this information in the right place at the right time? Shown to the right user in the right component?
00:21
This is Writers In Tech, a podcast where today's top content strategists UX writers and content designers share their well kept industry secrets. Hello and welcome, everyone, to Writers in Tech, a podcast brought to you by the UX Writing Hub. The UX Writing Hub is probably the biggest online education platform for UX writers, content designers, and more. And we also host the Writers in Tech podcast. My name is Yval Kesteher. I'm the CEO and founder of the UX writing hub. Today I have an amazing guest. Her name is Amanda Bridge. And Amanda actually had the opportunity to build the discipline of UX writing and content design in her previous company named Procore Technologies. And today, Amanda works as a senior content Designer head HubSpot. Amanda, how are you?
01:16
I am great. How are you doing?
01:17
I'm pretty good. Super happy to have you here today. Very excited.
01:21
Baby here too.
01:22
And I wanted to ask you, first of all about so you've been doing it for a while now, since 2014.
01:30
Yes.
01:31
Right. Because you had to build a discipline for a few years, like, at least grow into the discipline. So what's your background is like and what's your story is like.
01:43
Yeah, so I actually went to school for teaching English in high school, secondary education. And I didn't really know I was going to get into Tech until I tried to get a job in education, and that was before, I guess, the lack of teachers. Right now, it would be easier to get a job as a teacher. And so when I was trying to find a job, I actually realized that I could use my teaching and English background to become a writer for Tech. And so I got a job at Procore in 2014 when they were kind of a smaller company. I was actually the first IC technical writer that they hired, and I kind of helped my manager build out that department, which was very fun. At the time, technical writing was embedded under product, and so while my title was technical writer, I was actually the only writer in product, and so I would have QAS and product designers come to me when they had a quick question about error message copy.
02:51
And I was a technical writer and then an instructional designer as well for about four years before I was like, well, I think I want to write for the product. I'm seeing a lot of things that could be improved in our product copy and how we converse with the user in the app. And I think I want to try and make this a full time job. And it was funny because I didn't actually know UX writing was a thing at the time. This was like 2017, I want to say. I did a bunch of research. I actually stumbled upon your newsletter and was like, oh my gosh, UX writing. This is an actual thing instead of like a copywriter, which was what my company was proposing to me. So I did like eleven months of proofs of concepts to my company until they finally bit and let me become a UX writer in 2018.
03:40
And then I had another nine months where I was the only UX writer, where I was just trying to prove to them this is something that we need. And so I spent a lot of time doing roadshows and explaining the importance of content design and also showing what I was capable of, and that what kind of impact a UX writer could have. And as time went on, I hired two more. I hired, like, a head of our discipline, the UX writing discipline, which was amazing. She helped me grow as a UX writer and as a person. And then we had a team that were able to build out. And yeah, when Procore IPOed, actually I ended up deciding and realizing, like, in my seven year tenure at Procore, I was looking for a new challenge. So I left and I moved to HubSpot, which was a very it is a very different experience from being on a small team to now.
04:36
HubSpot has, I would say, over 20 content designers. So, yeah, very different experience here.
04:43
Wait, how many content designers do you have at HubSpot?
04:46
I'd say more than 20. I'm not exactly sure wow. On the amount, but there's a lot.
04:51
It's very and what's the difference between working, like, setting up the discipline and kind of doing roadshows and building a case for the profession versus joining a mature team where your boss and your boss of your boss, and probably the CEO of the company, knows the value of it? What was that difference? Did you feel like you have now more time or in general, that you have probably more time to focus on the actual practice itself because you have more, I would say, common ground with people in the company.
05:33
It's such a huge difference working at a company that already knows the value of content design and working under Jonathan Coleman. And we have so many amazing leaders here who just know the impact that you can bring and what your job is. I think it's so nice not needing to explain what my job is and how I'm not a marketing writer or a technical writer or a copywriter in every meeting that I'm in. So it's amazing there are challenges that come with it. If you listen to Jonathan Coleman's podcast or I guess episode on this podcast, you'll hear that he hired like ten to 30 content designers and he said he was going to I was in that wave of lots and lots of content designers that they hired. And so the challenge now that I think a lot of us new content designers coming into HubSpot have is there are so many of us and we are all very new to the software and the processes and everything that you need to learn to be effective at writing at HubSpot.
06:42
And I think now it's just kind of like figuring out how to align all of our different experiences in creating cohesive and effective content across all of our different product areas because there's a.
06:55
Lot yeah, it's a huge product. What's your area in HubSpot, by the way? To the listeners that don't know, HubSpot is one of the biggest CRM systems in the world, integrates with many different other tools. I use it myself. It's pretty cool in my opinion because the user experience is really good for a person working in sales or marketing. So what is the area that you're working on in this product?
07:24
Yeah, so we have products called Hubs. And so yeah, like you said, we've got sales, marketing service, all these different Hubs that you can use as a business owner, entrepreneur and SMB sector. I actually work on the Academy strategic integrations and marketplaces products and so these are kind of outside, most of them are outside of the main Hubs that you would use and rather more in the first touch points that you would experience when you first find HubSpot. If you search up HubSpot, the first thing that you're going to see on Google most likely is going to be HubSpot Academy. And so these are courses, we offer free courses to upskill in your career, learn about something that you've been wanting to learn about and stuff like that. So I work on the experience in that product and then also around finding and installing integrations.
08:21
That's awesome. Great product.
08:23
Yeah, it was cool because I do have that educational background to be able to work on Academy, which is my main focus right now in 2023.
08:32
I think it's really good, the Academy of HubSpot in general. I feel like the foundations of HubSpot, I'd say the content foundations of HubSpot since forever, since I remember myself using the Internet is very educational content like content that educates you as a user, even if it's like a blog post that is unrelated to HubSpot. And they are really good at building an educational ecosystem that eventually you don't even know what HubSpot is doing most of the time. But whenever as a small business owner, you understand that you need some kind of a solution and you look for the type of solutions HubSpot comes into your way and then you're like, oh, I've seen this name before. Because they wrote like hundreds of articles or courses before that helped me. And I think that's a very smart type of marketing that HubSpot has been doing from the very beginning, I'd say.
09:36
Yeah, from a content design perspective internally. It's also really cool to work on a product that is not run by the amount of money that we bring in. Right. Everything that Academy does is free. And so it's great to just have your main goal be, how can we help our users? How do we get our users to the information that they need to help grow their career, which I really like.
10:03
That's cool. So do you have growth metrics that are not related to conversions that it's attached to money? Do you have stuff that you measure in the Academy product of HubSpot as?
10:15
Yeah, I mean, we're actually kicking off a study now where we're trying to figure out how do we improve the, I guess, real world tangibility of the things that we learn? Because were measuring, okay, people are watching these courses for this amount of hour, and they're coming back for these certain amount of days. But now in running some other research, we realized that, okay, they'll watch this course, but how much knowledge are you bringing into your day to day? How usable is this knowledge after you take the course? And so we're trying to figure out how people can apply, how we can improve our courses so that they're more applicable to the real world.
10:52
That's very cool. So I know that there's a lot of people right now that are concerned with whatever going on in Tech right now. So the people that are listening right now and Google just laid off a lot of people last week. Other very big companies laid off people talking about recession. And when I hear about recession, I always try to think, where is the opportunity here? Where is the option to grow and what the future is going to hold for this profession of UX writing and content design? So my question for you, Amanda, is what's your take right now about whatever is happening right now in the world?
11:33
Yeah, it was really lucky to I feel very lucky to have gotten this job at HubSpot right before the recession because that would definitely be a concern of mine. But as far as content design specifically as it applies to layoffs and stuff, I think it depends on your company. Right. You need to make sure that you are working at a company that values content design. And yeah, I guess having been employed, feeling very secure in my employment, I don't have a lot to say about the recession in general. But I can speak to the worry of maybe AI writing is going to take over our jobs and how that might apply. Would that be okay?
12:21
So what's your take on AI? Is it going to replace us?
12:27
Okay, this might be a hot take, but I think it might replace a lot of what I would consider to be UX writing. So for me, my title is Content Design, and I really like that title because it encompasses what, I think a lot of things that a content designer does, which is, to me, UX writing is something you do within the discipline. So it's a lot of copywriting. It's deciding on error messages. It's deciding on things that are just more in the writing part of it. You also have like, content strategy, content ops, and content. And at HubSpot, we actually just started working with Writer, which is a software for it actually is AI writing. And so what I think AI is going to do is offload a lot of the nitty gritty, smaller work so that content designers can focus on overall strategy and design.
13:26
So instead of users, or I guess designers coming to us for like, hey, can you write this button copy? Can you write this tooltip? Can you write this modal? They'll come to us, and we can focus on overall information flow throughout an application. We can offload copywriting to the AI, and then, of course, we would need to spot check, but then we as content designers can work on, in my opinion, the really fun stuff, which is what is the conversation that's happening in this feature? Is this information in the right place at the right time, shown to the right user in the right component? Yeah.
14:05
And the people that will actually do the write those buttons, do you think they would just be people that are not necessarily UX writers, but they will have AI tools that will do it for them? Right?
14:17
I mean, I think that we as content designers are still going to need to check the AI. If you've ever used any kind of AI art filter, I know that there's some crossover with that, being worried about AI art taking over the art field. But you look at it and there's no soul, right? There's no humanness to it, and there's always little errors. So I think in both art and in content design, I think we're always going to need that human touch, and you'll be able to tell the difference, definitely. So I guess to answer your question, I think the people who will be writing the buttons and spot checking the AI is still going to be content designers, in my opinion.
14:59
And let's talk about by the way, we had the Mehabib Creative Writer here in the podcast as well. So we've been following their work for many years now. So shout out to writers and their team. Do you have some ideas about how UX writers are going to use AI tools? AI writing tools, yeah. Vision, even?
15:22
Yeah. I think aside from what I already talked about, what I really like about writers specifically is that it allows you to add in terms that we use and definitions of things. I think that's probably my favorite features is the Terms and Snippets and their Figma plugin. So as the designers that I work with are building their designs in figma, they can see like, oh, this word is actually referencing something else in a different part of the product. It helps us think on a system wide basis, like we're thinking about, I guess when we're designing, oftentimes we're designing in silos, which is unfortunately just the nature. I don't know if that's ever going to be able to change without a lot of work. But we are so focused, our job is to be so focused and experts within our field that it's almost impossible to learn, especially a product as large as HubSpot.
16:19
And so if we have little reminders and helpers like Writer's figma plugin to, you know, I was thinking about naming this feature this, but as I put it into Writer, I see that's actually the name of a different feature. Right. I think it's going to be a game changer.
16:37
That's awesome. So mostly for, I'd say, building some kind of a content style guide internally that help more people to understand how we write it upspot or how we write it our own company. And the AI will basically help us to create that type of consistency.
16:57
Yeah, it's like a style guide but amped up a lot.
17:01
Yeah, that's awesome. And do you have any other use cases that you can think of about how UX people in general are going to use AI tools?
17:10
I've only really used our AI tool for a couple of months, and so the ideas that I have are just around offloading copywriting and especially with how many teams that I work with. And a lot of content designers work with a ton of teams. And so you obviously can't be in every place at once. So if you have a repository of reusable error messages or if you have unique cases, you can just offload some work onto the AI and just have your designer self serve. I think it's going to help us as content designers just be in more places at once or remove us as a blocker on content, at least knowing that we can semi trust this AI to write for us.
17:55
All right, Amanda, so that was a great take. Now I have a question for you related to working in a big team, relatively big team of other UX writers. So how exactly does it work? So every person has other type of, let's say, responsibility on different Hubs in the product. So how exactly do you work together or every person work in a different product team? How the structure?
18:23
So HubSpot is all of our content designers are actually embedded within whatever product that we're working on. So my product is called Ecosystems, which encompasses the ones I said before, so Academy Marketplaces and Strategic Integrations. And then you'll have somebody else who maybe works on Lindsay who you talked about before, works in reporting, or somebody else works in a part of the sales hub. And so we're all embedded and report either up to a product design manager or a content design manager. So, in my case, I report up to my product design manager. I think there are benefits and challenges to that. A benefit is, of course, you get to focus on the product. And something that I found when I worked at Procore is I was almost like on two teams at once because I reported up to a content design manager and I also reported up to the product manager, and they both determined my roadmap, and I kind of had to meet in the middle between both of them.
19:31
Whereas here at HubSpot, I guess all of my priorities are just within my product, which is great for streamlining your work and preventing multitasking. The challenge is, of course, then you are siloed within your product. Right. We don't have a lot of crossover with other product designers unless you work on a team that has other product designers or sorry, other content designers. So, in my product, I'm the only content designer. So I don't have a ton of crossover with other content designers. However, we do have weekly or biweekly content design peer group meetings where you get to meet with other content designers and kind of share and critique your work. We also have monthly team meetups, which we just started, which is really great way to get to know the other content designers. But, yeah, I think with the boom in hiring, I think there's just right now a lot of adjusting that we're doing and figuring out, okay, we have a huge and impactful content design team.
20:31
How do we use this resource as a whole to the benefit of HubSpot?
20:42
And what will be the ratio between the designers and the writers in your company? So, for how many designers do you need a writer? Is it like one one ratio or one?
20:53
Yeah, it depends really, where you're placed some content designers. Are they manage two teams? I manage at one point, I was managing about 19 or 20. But that has gotten down considerably just because and I will ask source to say I have the largest scope of any content designer right now. But that has gotten narrowed down. And the hope is that we're going to hire at least one more content designer for my area. But it really depends on where you sit. And because we are embedded within each product area, it depends on what resource that product area thinks they need. Right. Some product areas will hire a content designer, some won't, some will hire multiple. So it's up to the product design manager.
21:46
Many people in the audience probably asking themselves like they work in companies they understood they need better content design in their company. They're not HubSpot, because HubSpot is matured in a way that HubSpot understood it already. But we can't take it for granted in most companies in the world. It's not like that. So let me rephrase my question. My question would be when would be the right time for me to decide and to know that it's good time for me to hire a content designer or a UX writer?
22:19
Good question. I was thinking back to when I was at Procore. I guess it depends. If you're a large company, it should have been at least last year, right? If your company or your product has got multifaceted, it's got multiple different layers, multiple different products. My opinion is that you need a content designer for sure just to connect the dots between all the products and make sure that the voice and tone and how we're speaking to the user and the information that we're presenting is consistent. As far as if you've got a startup, yeah, I think it's a matter of what your product is. Is your product very design heavy? Are you working, look at your users and kind of determine yeah, I guess I'm not sure. I'm having a hard time understanding your question, but I think as far as the impact of content design in product, it's going to give you a leg up.
23:15
For me, I have a little bit of UX background and so I'm able to kind of speak the language of product design as well. But I chose to go into content design specifically because I really like looking at the intersection of designs and how I guess thinking about the conversation that the application is having with the user as they're moving through the product, what are they trying to accomplish?
23:41
It was a complicated question because there could be so many different scenarios where you need to decide if to hire a UX writer, even if you already hired one. For example, what I imagined, we have a client, the UX writing hub. This is a very big enterprise client and they decided that they will hire a UX writer, but they're kind of not sure what's the capacity? Like how many and they need it. 100% they need it. They didn't had it until today. And it's like, it's a huge company that's worked for the past 20 years and nobody was in touch, nobody was in charge of that part of any of their products, which is wildly irresponsible. But I'm in the game of always convincing them why they need more. And this is like a conversation that we have all the time, which is they understand that they need it and we always like taking down fires all the time.
24:40
And I'm asking on the behalf of these type of people that are not sure, wait, do we need to hire one? Should we take a freelancer if we're taking one? Like what's the capacity? We're not sure if we're going to have enough work for them and so on. So it's kind of a discussion that I have with a few companies lately. So that's why I was asking specifically for those who are not sure when would be the best time to hire?
25:06
Yeah, I guess as a simple rule, I would say once you have, I don't know, maybe five designers, three to five designers, then I would say hire a content designer.
25:19
Nice. I think that's something that people could definitely think about. Are there any resources that you can recommend that you've been following lately that helps you with your professional career and even content that is not directly related to UX?
25:35
I obviously have been following your podcast and your email subscription for many years. That was kind of the first thing is when I was hiring, I read a lot of the resources that you put out Medium. I've written, like, two or three articles on Medium, but that's not indicative of my time that I spend reading, so on there. I think the biggest thing that has helped me in my career is I actually took an Intro to Product Design at General Assembly, and that really helped me, I guess, hone in on what it means to be a content designer. I was able to show up more confident in meetings with designers, having that perspective of the full scope of design. And I think it helped me, I guess, look at designs with a less narrow scope and a more like, okay, overarching, what is the user goals?
26:35
I was able to run my own research. I was able to build my own designs. I feel like a lot of content designers would be like, I know what I'm trying to do, but I don't know how to build it. Right. If you can just take a simple UX design course so that you can at least translate what you're thinking of into a figma file, make things as interactable and visual as possible, because that's how product designers think. Right. I feel like I see a lot of content designers who work a lot in Google Sheets or Google Docs, and it's hard to kind of advocate for what you want because it's not visual, because you're not speaking the language of a product. And so, yeah, I think that was the number one thing that helped step up my career was taking that course. But I bet you don't need to find one that is paid.
27:30
You can probably find YouTube videos or courses on UX design and other places as well, like Coursera or something.
27:37
Definitely. And I think that's a very smart comment, and that's a very good time for us to promote class that we've just launched last week, which is Figma for UX writers, which is, to be honest, it's not a Figma class, it's a design class for UX writers, helping writers to understand the basics of designs. I agree with you. You don't need to build the design system, but it's important to understand what is a design system, what's the architecture of a design system, what is a grid system, what is composition, and so on. So I think it's a very smart move for any UX writers to learn as much as they can about design. It will also help you to have better ground, common ground with your designers, which is important. It's a very important thing to do. So I agree with you. Yeah. I will add it to the show notes.
28:26
Check it out, everyone. It's live. It has a WhatsApp group where if you have any issues, we just answer you on the spot. We really do a lot of effort to help you to better at design, because I think it's a good tip. I think Kickstarters should be they are designers, and they need to know how to work with different design tools and do copy management in the design tools and not use a spreadsheet, for example. All right, that's awesome. Amanda, thank you so much for being here today. It was a lot of fun to interview you. And I have a question for you. That's the last question. And the question is, how do you think we should name this episode?
29:01
I think the main thread throughout all of this was advocating for your content. Like advocating for yourself, because we talked about AI. We talked about starting up and bringing content design resources in. Yeah. Maybe like advocating for your content.
29:17
Sounds good.
29:18
Yeah, I love it.
29:19
Thank you. Let's let our editor to choose. I think advocating for your content is good, and that's about it. Amanda, it was a pleasure to have you here today. If people would like to find you, is it okay if I will add your LinkedIn account on the show notes? Awesome. So I'll do that, and that's about it. Thank you, everyone, for joining another episode of Writers In Tech. This podcast brought to you by the UX Writing Hub. We have a weekly newsletter, a weekly blog post. We have bi weekly podcast episode for Writers in Tech and a lot of free content for UX writers. Amanda said that she joined our newsletter a few years ago, and it really helped her. There is a reason, because we really invest a lot of efforts to make sure that it's useful and valuable to people that want to get into the field and for people that already working in the field.
30:11
So I really recommend you to check it out. We have also paid courses as well. You can find them in our website, but you can start with the free stuff, for sure. And my name is Yuval. I'm the founder of the UX writing hub. And it was a pleasure. Glad to have you here today. I'll see you next time. Bye.