In this episode of the Writers in Tech podcast, Yuval Keshtcher interviews Mohana Das, a lead UX Writer at Lazy Pay and founding member of a group of UX writers in India. They discuss Mohana's journey into content design, the challenges she faces as the only UX writer at her company, and the concept of "content debt" - a build-up over time of bad content that accumulates just like financial debt. The podcast is brought to you by the UX Writing Hub, which offers free and advanced courses on UX writing including Figma for UX Writing and Generative AI for UX Writers. Mohana, a content designer at LazyPay, shares her approach to tackling content debt in the interface. She emphasizes starting with a full audit of the entire application and product and taking a holistic approach. Mohana also stresses the importance of defining goals and ROI before revamping content. To show impact, she recommends picking low-hanging fruit like button copy or key screens for optimization. Collaborating with designers is crucial for success in this field. For those looking to break into content design, Mohana advises brushing up on UX fundamentals and creating a strong portfolio with real-world projects.
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00:00
Badly written content, badly designed content, and miscommunicated information over a really long period of time. All that accumulates into what I term it as content debt.
00:20
This is Writers Intact, a podcast where today's top content strategist UX Write and content designers share their well kept industry secrets. Hello and welcome to Writers in Tech, a podcast brought to you by the UX Writing Hub. We had a long break for a few weeks. That's because I got married, so mazato to me. Now we're back, trying to keep it as fluent as possible and having the most fantastic guests in the field of UX Writing and content design, helping people to understand more about this field, helping people to get into this field, and helping people to just better at UX Writing. My name is yvalkesh Tejer and I'm the founder of the UX writing hub. Feel free to check it out. We have a free UX Writing course and more advanced courses that we've just launched, such as the Figma for UX Writing class and the Generative AI for UX Writers class.
01:18
That is pretty cool, pretty new. Check it out. Today we have a special guest that I've been waiting for a long time to speak with. Her. Mohanna Das is the admin and founding member of a very big group of UX writers india and also work as a lead UX Writer at Lazy Pay and also being a mentor for UX Writers that want to get into the field. Mohana, how are you?
01:44
I'm doing great, Yoal. Thank you for having me here. It's great to be here.
01:49
It's great to have you. I know that you've been working as a UX Writer for a while now, started in different companies, did a career transition in 2020, and climbed all the way to a leadership role at LazyPay. Tell us more about your background and how you got into this field.
02:12
Absolutely. I mean, it's been a kind of a roller coaster journey. I know that sounds cliched, but it's literally been like a zigzag path. I started my career around eight years back, and back then I was a software engineer. In fact, I studied engineering. I got a job as a quality analyst, QA, so basically software testing. I did that for around three and a half years. After that, I pivoted into UX design. I was working at Adobe at the time, and they had a great program where you could laterally shift into a career of your interest. UX Design was something I was interested in. That was my first career move. Once I did that, I worked as a designer, I worked on UX, I worked on products for a few more years, and finally I've transitioned into content design, or UX Writing. That was the final move or the final shift.
03:19
This is going to be a long career ahead in content design. As far as breaking into the field was concerned, I didn't really go for any higher degree or a certification in content design as such. Neither did I do so for UX design. When I shifted, it was a very organic kind of move. In fact, interestingly enough, when I moved to writing, I was kind of in a career break. It was a career transition for me, like, I think around October of 2020, right at the height of the pandemic, right? I just quit my job as a designer without another job lined up, and remote work was starting to be a thing at the time, and it was like, blurring the boundaries of work and life, and I was completely burned out by that point, and I decided to take a break and explore my options, right?
04:13
Writing was one of these options, and this is something like writing was something I've wanted to do ever since I was a child. I wanted to be a writer. Somehow that kind of got lost along the way. I decided to bring that back into my career in some way or some form, and I started freelancing with a few startups and design studios and things like that, and I did all kinds of writing, right, including copywriting. I tried content writing and eventually moved into UX writing. When I discovered it, I was like, wow, this role enables me to use all the skills I've gathered in my career till now and combine that with writing. It's something I've always wanted to do. For me, I knew at that point exactly what my final career move was going to be. That was my journey, and that was how I broke into the field.
05:07
And, yeah, I encourage other people to take risks like that as well. I mean, if you're interested in the content design field, definitely take a leap of faith and try your hand at it.
05:20
What a journey. Do you feel like that your background in software QA, then design kind of help you to build yourself towards your role as a UX writer, for sure.
05:32
I mean, that's no questions asked. I would say yes, because everything I've done till now, I feel like that's added up to where I am today, right? Like, experience in software, experience in code, understanding how products work, the technicalities of it. That's helped me communicate and collaborate with engineers, my experience as a designer, that's helped me understand the perspective of designers that I work with. Right. And it also content design. It's not just about writing, right? I mean, you need to have a background, or not a background, maybe, but more like a knowledge or a foundation of UX fundamentals in order to be a successful content designer. So that's definitely helped me. It's been, like, one of my strengths when I've moved into content design, so it's definitely added to it. I mean, I wouldn't take away from any part of that journey. It's all been like a plus.
06:39
That's awesome. Now you work at a fintech company, right, which is different than what you used to do, for example, in Adobe or different design studios. Tell me a bit more about your role at Lazy Pay.
06:55
Yeah, so Lazy Pay or it's part of PAYOU finance as we also call it. It's basically a lending product and working in the fintech space, especially in a startup, is definitely very different from anything else I've done. When I first joined, it was certainly intimidating learning about lending, financial jargon, all the technicalities of loans, credit payments. It was a lot, I would say, definitely say it's a lot to process when you first start working in fintech. It's very different at the same time because the fintech industry is usually very regulation laden. You have to worry about things like being compliant, you're dealing with financials, so there's always added security, added risks involved. There's a lot to keep in mind when you're working in fintech. My role is basically I'm the lead UX Writer by title, right? I'm also the only UX writer in the company.
08:02
I basically handle everything content related within the customer experience apart from say, marketing. Right? Any kind of communications, customer communications, or in app content, sometimes the website as well, play, store release notes, everything like down to the nitty gritties, I would say all product related communication goes through me. A lot more, I mean, not just limited to content design, but also limited to a lot of the customer communication.
08:36
Can you tell me more about the challenges that you're facing right now as the only UX Writer at Lazy Pay?
08:42
I first joined, there were certainly a lot more challenges than I'm facing today. For example, when you join as the only UX Writer in a really fast paced startup environment, you have to hit the ground running, right? You have to understand all of these business lines verticals, have to meet a lot of different people and start working with them very fast and also work in parallel on a lot of projects at the same time. There's a lot of context switching that happens when you're the only UX Writer. One day in a week you're working on Project X and the next day you have to switch over and start working on Project Y, right? That's definitely a major challenge when you're the only one because you can't really delegate or hand off anything else and you have to stay, keep switching your mindsets and when you're working on different things at the same time.
09:49
I think those things streamlining and prioritization helps a lot in certain cases when you're doing that. It's gotten better, but I do remember the time when I joined, at first it was crazy. It was chaos. There was no process. I kind of had to set up a process from scratch on how other people should work with content designers and UX writers in the system. A major challenge I used to face, which thankfully I don't face anymore, is people not involving content designers early in the game. I think a lot of people, every other podcast episode, I've heard a lot of people mention this quite a lot, right? It's something that plagues content designers and UX writers all over, not being involved right from the get go when a project kicks off, right? That's something that it still exists to some extent here. I'd say with time and the more you get to know people and the more you push back and articulate that this is not something that we should be doing, it tends to get better.
10:55
Definitely.
10:56
When the company hired you, did they knew for 100% that they need a UX writer or it was like they wasn't sure how did the hiring process go? Because the reason I'm asking is I'm talking to many companies today and it's split into half. Half of the companies are like, we don't need that, right? We have Chad GPT or whatever, or we just don't need it at all. That's one. Other companies are like, hey, we must to have that. We need that type of operation in our company where someone is in charge of the words of the user interface. What was the state of lazy pay when they hired you?
11:39
Well, so when they hired me, I would say they were pretty sure that they were looking for a UX writer, if not many, at least one, because they've been having problems with words and communications being all over the place, miscommunications too much jargon in their product, and a lot of similar such content debt in the application. I would say, I mean, I can't really speak for them, but I would say the vibe that I got was they were definitely looking for somebody, a content designer or a UX writer to handle both content and as well as customer communications. That was also a big part of it, which was their requirement. I think more than just the writing, they were looking for somebody who goes beyond that. I think that's what a lot of content designers do. The filling in the words is just the last piece of the process, right?
12:39
A lot of what we do, it happens before the actual writing begins, right? User research, understanding people's needs and motivations, understanding the customer journey, talking to people and doing a lot of ideation, which doesn't really come. Like you've not even reached the screen yet and you've already done so much. I think that is something that the people hiring me were looking for. The words just came later that was the byproduct and the result of everything else that happens behind the scenes. I don't think Chad GPT is going to be replacing us anytime soon.
13:18
I agree with you about that. I love the term that you described. It a content debt when you have your in your product and company. So what is the content debt?
13:31
Well, if I have to describe it's just a build up over time of so much bad content, badly written content, badly designed content, and miscommunicated information over a really long period of time. All that accumulates into what I term it as content debt because you have to pay the price for it sooner or later. Right. I think of it's very similar to actual financial debt because the more it piles up, the more you have to pay the price later on. That's something that people need to catch on to early on and cull that debt as soon as possible.
14:18
I love this term. I think we might use it in the name of the episode as well. Content debt. It's so powerful and also, I guess it's compounding as a debt like any other debt. Right? It's not that it's compounding, which might be dangerous in a way, for the product. Let's say that I was hired into this company and they have a huge content dash right now. Means they have a lot of what I call the dusty corners in the interface, where nobody touches those corners for a long time. Now, where would you start in order to pay in, quote, pay for that debt?
14:55
Wow. Okay. That's a great question, and I asked myself the same question when I joined. Where do I start? You have to start right at the beginning. What I did in the beginning was I just pulled up my sleeves and got down to a full blown audit of the entire application and the product. I feel that is the best starting point, really looking at each and every screen, each and every line, every word in your product, in all the screens, and getting it all together and just looking at it with a holistic approach, just a bird's eye view of everything. That gives you a good sense of where things are broken, how often things are breaking, and exactly how much of an effort or how much you're going to have to pay to get rid of all this debt. Right. The price, basically. An audit is definitely where I started off, and you first start with an audit and then you move on to the next steps.
16:06
Right? You have to ask yourself, why are we doing this? What are we going to achieve by rehashing and revamping all this content in the system? How much effort is this going to take? And what's the ROI of doing this? You need to define that as well. You get down to the basics. You ask yourself, what is the next step? You define what the end result of the entire cleanup is going to look like, right? Starting from what your brand voice is, what kind of guidelines you're going to follow, things like that, and basically prepare a full timeline of that process.
16:47
Usually what is the low hanging fruits in that type of process? Like, you decided to do some kind of an audit, but you have many different options. So where would you start?
16:57
That's a good question because and I'd like to combine that with another parallel thought, which is how do I also at the same time show the impact of content design? Right? I think that's a great starting point where you look at things, you put them in a matrix of what is like high effort, high reward versus low effort, low reward and et cetera, and you pick the ones which are going to show the most impact in a short amount of time. That you can build a business case for tackling the bigger issues and the bigger chunks or modules in the system. I think that's the way I would approach it, where you have to make a case for yourself as well, why you want to do this, what's the impact of it, what's the ROI? Pick things like button copy, for example. Changing the words of a button can impact your conversions in a huge way.
17:57
And it depends. You can pick a few key screens. You can pick, say, landing screens, or you can pick payment screens. When you clean up the content in those key screens, the screens which add the most value, that's where you're going to get what you might term as low hanging fruit.
18:18
In your specific case, what were those important screens? Was it like an onboarding screen notifications or error messages buttons? What exactly was the first flow that you said, okay, that's the one I'm going to tackle? Because that's the content that need my attention the most at this point.
18:40
Yeah, I mean, for me, the first and most important thing I wanted to tackle. Just to give some context, lazy pay, it's basically a buy now, pay later product, right? We give users credit lines and we expect them to pay us back after, say, a certain duration. What impacts the business the most is whether these people are going to pay us back or not. What we term like internal lingo, we call them repayment communications. Right? That was a big and very important part of communications that had to be handled. Right? That was something that fell under my purview. It was definitely one of the first projects that came to me and we said that, listen, our repayment communications are in really bad shape. People are not paying us back, and we need people to pay us back more than what they're doing right now and so help make these communications a lot friendlier because A, they were very intimidating as well from the get go.
19:48
People were not liking the tone in which were asking them to pay us back. A make it friendlier, we add information as much as possible so that people are aware of what happens if they don't repay. That was also something which was missing in the communications, right? Yeah. C definitely optimize the communications in a way that you're not harassing people, not telling them hey, listen, pay us back every two minutes, but at the same time you're being really friendly and really empathetic towards your user. I think that was one of the projects that it was one of my first few projects in fact, unfortunately, it's still in the works, it's still in the pipeline and we never really got it out till now due to changing business needs. It was one of the more interesting projects that I had to do, and I'd say another low hanging fruit was when were doing our credit card business, right?
20:48
We had a product which gave credit line in the form of a card, physical card that users could use, right? There was a screen like there was it wasn't a flow, it was more like just tackling one particular screen and trying to improve conversions on that screen. That was one of the initial things that we definitely took up and that got released pretty quickly. We changed the entire structure of that screen. We changed the information hierarchy, what goes where, how much information to give them and what's the best way that they would understand what this product was about and which would encourage them to convert. That was our main objective there and that was something that were able to really do with the help of content. Content played a big role in that change.
21:43
My question to you is did you had some kind of a way to measure the success of this project? Like to test it and to measure if it was helpful or not to return the investment?
22:00
Yeah, absolutely. It was a layered approach to testing this both qualitative and quantitative. Right? When it comes to qualitative analysis, we did run some usability tests with users. We asked them questions. We gauged whether the screen, the new screen people were able to comprehend it or not and were they incentivized enough to move on to the next screen and as well as quantitative so we tested different variants of the same screen with just minor tweaks in either the button or in the headline. We measured them at the same time, we released them at the same time, showed them to different users, like an A B test. Yeah, we saw the numbers and the numbers in the funnel were significantly different. Right. That was a clear indicator of the success of redesigning or revamping that screen with a content first approach.
23:03
That's amazing. Did you work with other designers on this project, work with design tools and product managers?
23:09
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, every project I do here involves it's a triad. It's a product manager, a designer, and me, a content designer. It's always I mean, in an ideal scenario, of course, it's always us collaborating right from the get go. Usually, designers and content designers like me do working sessions here, where we discuss what the page might look like. How could we optimize content on this page? It's not about filling the blanks, where a designer just comes to you and gives you the screens and says, hey, listen, could you write the content for me here? That's not the ideal way to go about things. So it's a very collaborative process. Every project is the same, where we work hand in hand with designers and take equal responsibility of how the design ends up.
23:59
I wanted to ask you a question about if you have any tips. I know that you work also as a mentor, helping people in the field. Do you have any tips for people that want to get into the field but not sure exactly where to start?
24:13
Absolutely. I do get this question a lot from I've been getting it recently from Mentees as well. And, I mean, I wouldn't say that there's a checklist of sorts. It depends on the background you're coming from as well. For example, if you're coming from a design background, you already have the UX fundamentals, right, that's already in your arsenal of skills. If you were to I would say for the people, like, coming from there, it's slightly I wouldn't say easier, but it does help you to get into and break into that field. If you're not coming from that kind of background, I would definitely suggest brush up on UX fundamentals. That's going to be going to play a big part in design thinking skills, product thinking skills. This matters a lot because you don't want to be, like, just you're not going to be, like, just a writer who fills in the blanks in the screens, right?
25:13
You want to be a collaborator. You want to be a person who's designing with words rather than just writing. So, yeah, definitely brush upon your UX fundamentals, brush upon your writing skills, and definitely invest time and effort in creating a really kick a** portfolio. I mean, if you're just breaking into the field, it may be difficult to have really amazing projects or things like that, but I think that's something should constantly be striving for, like, keep improving your entire range of work. Try and get real world work into your portfolio, right? And not just like a concept project. That's something that also matters a lot to a few recruiters. Like get like real world stuff. Get like real projects which have real impact into your area of work. And that's going to help.
26:09
That's great recommendations. That's why the exciting academy we offer people real world experience with the real project. That's something really important. Mohana, thank you so much. If you had to choose a name for the headline of this episode, what would it be?
26:25
Wow, okay. You're really putting me on the spot though.
26:28
It is the question we ask most of our guests. Let me help you. Let me help you. I really like the idea of talking about content debt. I think most people should hear this term. So definitely something around that area. And that's just my thought about that.
26:46
Absolutely. I think content debt is a great thing to add in the title and maybe also about breaking into the field. Maybe that's something that could serve as an input.
26:58
Maybe something like how to Kill your Content Debt or something like that.
27:04
Yeah, paying the price.
27:06
Yes, something like that. Something like that. No, I'm just kidding. Mohana, thank you so much. It was pleasure to have you and very nice to meet you in person finally. Thank you.
27:19
Thank you so much. Yuval, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
27:23
Awesome. Thank you, the listeners, for listening to another episode of Writers in Tech. If you liked it, give us some reviews. Listen, I heard that more people would find this podcast if you'll give us reviews, share it with a friend. If you found it helpful, give us some comments, anything at all or just email me@uvalitivixwinningham.com. I'd love to talk to you and chat. And that's about it. See you in the next episode. By.