A transcript of Episode 231 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, Michael Metts and Andy Welfle discuss apply design principles to writing.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristan Schaaf.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
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Computer voice
UX podcast episode 231.
Per Axbom
You’re listening to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden,
James Royal-Lawson
helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.
Per Axbom
We are your hosts Per Axbom
James Royal-Lawson
And James Royal-Lawson,
Per Axbom
with listeners in 192 countries from Iraq to Austria.
James Royal-Lawson
So Andy Welfle and Michael Metts have just written writing is designing. A book about words and the user experience and how to avoid them being just an afterthought.
Per Axbom
And he’s been working as a content strategist for around a decade, including at Facebook, and is currently UX content strategy manager at Adobe in San Francisco.
James Royal-Lawson
Michael is a writer and UX designer who currently heads the conversation design practice for chatbots at Allstate in Chicago. And now to see whether we can put some words together in a designed fashion to make an interview.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’m going to start off a bit cheeky I was thinking about, writing is designing and designing with words. I imagined instead of like, you know, my bunch of Whiteboard pens and sketching tools and everything, that instead we could start designing with using charades I want a website that’s three syllables. The first syllable is like another word for fish. Do I get it now is that is that the kind of the essence of the book?
Michael Metts
They’ve gotten a lot of good work done with Mad Libs in the past, which is similar, you know?
Andy Welfle
Yeah. Yeah. Give me an adjective here for e- commerce.
Andy Welfle
What do you want your e-commerce to look like? Yeah,
Per Axbom
you did have sort of like a Mad Lib in the in the strategy chapter where you made the pitch of what to do, I think.
Michael Metts
Yeah, that one originally came from Sara Wachter-Boettcher who wrote our forward and she, she started teaching that in workshops and that’s just a neat way to help people think about their strategy as a written thing without feeling like they really have to be expert writer. So you kind of give them the template to fill In for this strategy statement, and it helps people have a really good conversation about it.
Per Axbom
What I’m taking away when I’m looking through the book and reading the chapters is I’m realising. So here’s another book about writing. And I’m getting the sense that we sort of have to motivate why writers are important all the time. And is that true?
Michael Metts
I wish it weren’t, I wish it weren’t. And I don’t know if if writers are important, but writing is important. I mean, the role discussion makes this really complex because some people do writing full time, that’s their job day after day. But every team is creating written interface that that goes out into the world, every software development team, product development team, they’re creating something that includes written language, maybe their edge cases out there somewhere, but I think like even if you have the, you know, like a VR experience that is almost entirely visual, you still have little labels and things that help you understand how to use it. So we hope that people start to think of the writing as really important. And naturally writers are really good at writing. So having them around is really helpful for that. But I think what we want people to focus on is the writing itself.
Andy Welfle
And I think one reason why we often don’t. You know, focus on the roles is that, I mean, just like the book title says, we really want people to kind of apply a design methodology to the words which often don’t happen. It’s usually like a flow or specific elements or, you know, just kind of like the behaviour of the site. But, you know, if you’re iterative and you’re, you’re testing the words, and, you’re researching terminology and looking kind of at the overall system, rather than just like, you know, popping the words in there, the last the last minute, which happens a lot. You know that that’s kind of what we’re really trying to drive home with the title and throughout the book.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I mean, something that I mean, when we talked about writing over the years, it’s one of those things that people say. Content first is something we hear or it used to be mobile first now it is content first. But one thing that I came across when looking at the book or looking through the book, is that exactly you said that design words or the writing it’s not just something you need to do first or last, or anything? It’s actually the entire design process hangs itself around all the words.
Andy Welfle
Yeah.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, I think we’re trying to be a little, you know, counter-cultural, everyone wants to be first, maybe, but that’s not so important. You know, like, actually just being involved all the time is what’s important and being intentional about what you’re doing. It’s really important. So, naturally I think that the reason like the content first idea came around is that, you know, people weren’t including writers as much as they maybe could have are including content strategists. I know sometimes that that phrase is used when you think of like a website content strategy where the design team creates all these templates without ever thinking about what’s going to go in them. Right. So I think it’s just a matter of being included and partnering. And what we really want to do is give writers the language and techniques they can use to partner with their teams, and be a really valuable part of those teams.
Per Axbom
Because we even do have a chapter on inviting yourself to meetings and being part of all that because you’re not always invited and people tend to not think of you and they tend to think of you as someone you add on at the end. Whereas many of the arguments in the book which I love the are about the writing is the design if we start with the writing will know better how to design the interface.
Andy Welfle
Definitely I, I know, you know, at my place where I work, there’s a lot of new just high level discussions and strategy that happens before even wireframes start to start to come together. And they’re like, Oh, we don’t need writers in here. This is just a strategy discussion. And I often will say, Well, what are the discussions made out of they’re made out of words, and you know, we’re going to be talking about nouns and verbs that are going to happen within this, this interface, even before drawing comes together. So that’s kind of the best place for us to be. And sometimes that works sometimes to test it.
Per Axbom
Because there’s always also this point you’re making that sometimes the words aren’t the problem when you come in later on. And as you’re tasked with, please add some words this interface and you start questioning even what does this interface do? What I can’t motivate myself to write something for this because I don’t even understand what it’s doing?
Andy Welfle
Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, I hope that if people come away with one thing, especially those who are new to the field, they come away with a higher comfort level of asking questions and doing discovery work. Because I think writers tend to get pushed out of that piece of UX, they tend to be, like you said, they get us a task. Sometimes it’s even a spreadsheet, right? Like, a spreadsheet with 50 scenarios we need messages for all these scenarios. And, what we hope people will see is that it’s more valuable, your impact can be so much greater. If you don’t just do what you’re told in that scenario, and write those 50 messages that you’ve been asked to write. If you actually start a conversation with your team and get more involved in the vision and what people are trying to accomplish with the product. You actually become more effective, everyone becomes more efficient. So I think it’s kind of a misconception that, asking those questions or doing that discovery work takes more time. It takes more time not to do it. And it’s more costly for your users in the end.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, it’s something I come across quite regularly because I’m an native English speaker but, work in Sweden, and a lot of the time I’ll work with Swedish projects. It’s not unusual that I’ll get the question. It’s kind of like, well, now what should it be on that button in English? And, you know, I can say, Well, I can tell you what I think it would be. I can give you my opinion about it. But um, you know, I can’t tell you what it should be. Because we haven’t done that kind of research. So, in some ways, it gives me the opportunity to come in and say, yes, this is me speaking. But you could run the risk of getting an English, educated in the 70s 80s in Great Britain. That’s gonna be your tone of voice for your interface. If you want that. Fair enough.
Michael Metts
Yeah, absolutely. And we give people some, I would say, lightweight research they can do. One of the best examples comes from gov.uk. Actually, there’s a link to the blog post, and maybe we can even share it over for the show notes. But, they have this technique called the highlighter method where they actually just take content and print it out. And I think people can do this with interfaces to more than they think like actual products with a lot of moving parts. And you just take the content and remove it from the interface give people different colour highlighters is the way they do it. So they do green and red highlighter. So in their case, I think what they do is use green for things that are really helping you and red for things that aren’t helping you very much. And then those are just naturally kickoff points for discussion around why those things may not help you. But the same sort of lightweight method could be used on a lot of product teams, but people don’t tend to think of the language people are interacting with as a user interface element. They’re usually thinking more visually than that.
James Royal-Lawson
And it makes a big difference to from target audience target audience, you can have 1 group of people who maybe they own they use, they’re familiar with terminology, because of their background, whereas another group for the same product or same website would not understand that language at all
Andy Welfle
Oh for sure, I think that yeah, it really helps you see kind of like a bigger picture and patterns within it. And of course, you know, it just gets you picking and picking into corners that you don’t, you know, you wouldn’t otherwise, you know, peek into, right like, like, Oh, I didn’t even think about this message, or I didn’t even realise that this was jargon or terminology that I wasn’t seeing before. We’ve done it that a couple times where I am and yeah, it’s a it always reveals something.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, you mentioned a number of times throughout the book, you mentioned the importance of context. I think you mentioned it with with error messages with inclusiveness and even in the strategy aspect, you talking about it. And that’s we think we’re familiar with context, when we think of situations people will be using it. But my spontaneous feeling is that maybe we aren’t as good as we’re thinking about language context.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, I think terminology has a lot to do with that, like I work on a lot of complicated design software, and at Adobe. And, you know, we usually say that, you know, jargon, or, you know, technical jargon isn’t always a bad thing. We just need to really, you know, reduce the number of it and make sure that we’re giving proper context in this case, and introducing it slowly and making sure that, you know, we’re disclosing it when a user needs it. So for sure, yeah, that’s a that’s something. I’m thinking a lot about just wearing the user journey are we putting up like, onboarding messaging or really Educating users how to use this thing.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, that’s a similar idea to I don’t know if you both have read, badass by Kathy Sierra. But it’s the idea of making users awesome that she talks about, you know, like sometimes that is the ideal approach where you help people understand those things. You help them level up their own skills and help them get more involved.
Per Axbom
Of course, you actually include them in making the content. And that’s why when I’m looking at this book and looking through it, what I really like is that it’s applying design thinking to just copywriting and it’s going through the strategy and user interviews and testing and experimenting. And there was some things that were really aha moments for me like, experimenting with tone, because that’s something I haven’t come across, because usually it’s the case that you’re told that this is what the website should convey. And then there is a black and white, right or wrong answer to how you should do that. But experimenting with tone, the way I interpret it is then that you would actually try and write things in different tones and see what works and test that. Could you walk us through how that would work?
Andy Welfle
Yeah. I think that, especially if you, if you do a lot of, you know, work on developing a series of tones that you want to test, you know, it’s something that like, I mean, it does a lot of work because you can’t just apply it toward one kind of message in isolation. Even though I guess in the book, I did use one message in isolation. I didn’t have time to do a whole, you know, anyhow, you can really apply you can really see I think, straight off, you can see tones that are kind of extreme and don’t work, right. Like, you don’t want to apply a really celebratory tone to you know, password reset button, or password reset message or something like that. But you can play around and test out a system that would, you know, maybe take on a more proactive or a more sympathetic or something that’s just very, very neutral and straightforward and kind of see what works the best I think that a lot of the time, you know, something that is neutral and something that’s not taking up a lot of like cognitive space in a user’s mind is going to come up best, but there are definitely like, high risk high touch areas where you, you know, it might surprise you how much kind of care and empathy you need to give in order to just really get it through a user’s mind or really get them to kind of complete a workflow. So that is definitely like one of the most, I don’t know what to say like editorial parts of a of a UX writers job is just really making sure you’re hitting the tone that’s appropriate for the user. And like you said, there’s no right or wrong answer for that. It could be a series of things, it could be kind of a blending of two tones. It could be something, you know, something in the middle. So testing really helps that
James Royal-Lawson
Sorry. I mean, how does that then, feed into brand voice and product voice? You mentioned both those different aspects as well in the book.
Andy Welfle
Yeah. Definitely a tone should not really. So I guess one thing I should kind of set some context up here is, you know, voice and tone Well, they’re very interrelated are definitely different things. And I think a lot of people conflate those right, like a tone is people talking about the tone of voice. And we’re kind of treating them differently here like I am Andy, I always have the same personality and the same set of values and the same interests and the same, you know, the same broad context. So that is my product voice, my product voice of Andy Welfle. Whereas my tone like you know, here on the podcast, I’m talking in a certain way, I’m talking about different things. I’m trying to set context I’m talking very long form, whereas if it’s, you know, just me and my sister or me and my college roommate, or me, my cat, you know, I might take on a different tone. I might, you know, speaking different Am I talking about different things?
Michael Metts
just for demonstration purposes? Could you explain tone to your cat?
Andy Welfle
I’ll see what I can do. [Kissy lip smacking noises] Come here
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, can you get cats on the phone? Yeah,
Andy Welfle
yes, try to get that [kissy lip smacking noises] into the interface to get the users attention.
Per Axbom
The cat tone.
Andy Welfle
So anyhow, yeah, so you always kind of want to keep a very consistent voice, whether that’s your brand voice, your product voice, but you do want to kind of vary your tone based on context. And that’s usually kind of how I how I describe it, right? Like there’s a continuum or a spectrum of tone, in which, you know, in a voice continuum, where it lives, right.
Per Axbom
I remember a few years back when MailChimp was always the go to example of how to write tone of voice on your website. And this is how you should do it. And it all sounded so strange to me, because that’s how they did it. It’s not how to do it. It’s, that’s one choice. And they also, I know they received some criticism. And in the end, they actually had a button in the settings that where you could switch it off. Switch off that fun tone.
James Royal-Lawson
yeah,
Andy Welfle
just if you don’t like it, just put a toggle on it. Yeah, I definitely like wanted, we wanted to provide a framework that was, you know, kind of scalable, like, you know, a really, really in depth system of tone isn’t may be best for, you know, a small directive piece of software. But like, if it’s something where, you know, you’re just using this interface to, you know, reorder batteries or something. It’s probably not, you’re not thinking about like, celebratory or sympathetic tones. But if you are a, well I should let Michael speak to this maybe. But if you’re like an insurance product or something, you want to make sure you’re being very, very careful about what the users thinking and what context they’re in and not saying like Congratulations, you just bought You just cashed out your life insurance. And, you know, the user might be going through something really traumatic or awful at that point. So yeah,
Michael Metts
yeah, I mean, it isn’t even that obvious a lot of times either. One example that I recently ran across was, I work on conversation design teams that are building automated chat systems for customer support. And one of the people I was working with, it was a really well intentioned comment, but their their idea was, maybe we should end each chat with, like, have a great day as a sign off. But the reason I push back on that was because we have no idea what people are going through when they’re chatting with us. So they could be, they could have just lost their house. They could have just been in a car accident, someone in their family could have just passed away. All of those things could be happening. And when we sign off, even though it’s cheerful for us, the The technology isn’t smart enough to know what’s going on in their lives. So we have to just be really, really careful and get those stress cases that you know, that people may be going through out in front of everyone.
Per Axbom
That’s such a good point. Because I think I mean, some people even have in their email signatures they have: Have a great day. And it’s the same point. That’s not not a message you want to give to everyone.
Andy Welfle
yeah. Though, with a with a person, though. Like if I think there’s often a little bit more tolerance for, for human saying that, right. Like, it’s something where, you know, I’m a free sign off, I’ll probably say, you know, have a good one, guys. And, you know, I don’t know what’s going on in your day. I don’t know. But I think people just have are given a little bit more leeway to, you know, be conversational and friendly and like, adapt to context where, you know, cold, hard interfaces, even a chat bot. You can’t put that sort of same expectation on them. So People definitely like, are a lot less forgiving and and rightfully so. Yeah. So.
Per Axbom
So is this becoming more and more important as we are getting our smart speakers into our homes? Is the interface dying in favour of the words?
Andy Welfle
I don’t know if the interfaces are dying. I think like those. There’s a lot of hype around conversational interfaces. Right now I’m on a team that focuses on that work in my day job. And they’re certainly really important. And I think, talking about language and talking about how we can apply design methods and research to language is really important for all that work that’s happening. I’m not sure how successful it’ll be like, I’m not I don’t paint myself as a futurist or anything like that. But I do think that those things, when you’re writing a dialogue for one of those things, it is design and a lot of people don’t think of it that way. You know, like, there was a new team we were working with at work. And they heard that I was from UX. And they were like, Okay, well, you know, just let us know if we should change anything about how the chat window looks. And, and I was thinking that’s, that’s not why I’m here. You know, like the chat window isn’t what gives customers a solution to the problem they’re going through, right? The dialogue, what the what this bot you’re making actually says that’s what does it. So I think we have a lot of work to do to help people think of words as a design element that is just as critical as anything else that people have typically thought of as design.
Andy Welfle
But seriously, Michael, what, what colour should we make that chat window?
Michael Metts
Oh, my goodness.
Per Axbom
You know, I mean, Steve Jobs would have, he would say something about the font and the size of the buttons later. So I mean, definitely important.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so I mean, we’ve mentioned the voice and tone, which are kind of concepts that aren’t next level, but in some ways they’re a little bit more next step when it comes to writing or creating words for these things, but I think I want to talk a little bit about error messages. You dedicated an entire chapter to error messages. And I think that’s something that all of us, whether were, you know, designers, wherever UX writers or even UX designers, error messages or something all of us have had to deal with. So, can you give us some advice about error messages?
Andy Welfle
I think a lot of where we go wrong with our messages is when we think about, as you said, dealing with them, right like for a lot of teams, they come last and usually they’re turned up by someone who’s doing that development work who’s like, Wait, hold on, there are like six scenarios we have to account for. Can you please just write something general, that we can tell people. In all six of these scenarios
Andy Welfle
An error has occurred. Please try again.
Michael Metts
Exactly. And I think that that’s kind of where we go wrong. The story that we tell in our book, there’s a interview with Lauren Lucchese, who’s a fantastic designer, she worked at Capital One for some time on, eno, and has done a lot of work in the space. And she talks about how she was given this assignment to write a bunch of error messages. And no one knew too much about why they were being triggered or what was going on. And what she focused on was how she could help people more effectively with those messages. So when you flip it on its head, that would be that would kind of be my main piece of advice. Don’t think about an error. Don’t think about the user being wrong, think about how you can help them move forward in every situation. So if there’s if there’s one big concept for people to go away with, that would be the one. So you know, one of the we give a few ideas for how to approach error messages. And the first one is avoid, like, the best error message is one that you don’t have to have it all because your design was good enough that it didn’t lead people down that path, right? Like a lot of these errors come from business processes or constraints that people have chosen to put into place that sometimes don’t even need to be there. So that you know that’s kind of my big piece of advice is like flip your flip your perspective on it and start to view them as more positive opportunities and less about like negative moments where people did something wrong.
Andy Welfle
The best error message is no error message.
Michael Metts
Exactly. Yeah.
Per Axbom
perfect
Andy Welfle
Try telling that to your engineering team though.
Michael Metts
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
When they come with a list of six that you really do need to have some text for this
Per Axbom
As I’m hearing you talk about this, what I’m thinking is that there are so many heroes out there who are unseen, but are writing all these texts that nobody’s reading on the product team, and for these error messages that nobody’s seeing, but it’s solving all of these problems and keeping them away from support and moving them forward. And it’s just these unspoken heroes of copywriting that are sitting and listening, I hope, who are real heroes. Yeah.
Andy Welfle
Yeah. And honestly, many of them are engineers, you know, like, yeah, they’re writing them because they have to, because if you don’t write something, this code has to be shipped in three hours, right? So there, there are definitely moments where like you, as a writer, or someone who’s focused on writing on a team, you may have some of those urgent situations where you have to just get something done. But if you start to build relationships with those people, they can start to identify things earlier and earlier and you can start to solve bigger problems over time.
Andy Welfle
Then on the other hand, there are I won’t say which product There is but there was a, there’s a pretty, there’s a error message that appears in a pretty old Adobe product that has been there for a while. And for a decade at least. And when you come in with like, you know, full vigour and ready to change things and file a JIRA ticket to try to get them to update that error message. And you get the response, oh, people, just people just Google that they can find out what that means if they just Google it. And putting the actual problem in the error message. That’s a fun one. Yeah. I don’t want to call anybody specific out on that. So here on this podcast
Per Axbom
To solve our problems, though, we’ll read your book. I think there are many, many concrete tips and pieces of advice that I’m certainly going to make use of when we’re talking to my team as well.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, really wanted to make sure we you know, Michael does as well. We want to make sure we’re giving like some high level context and sort of the, the rhetoric around solving these problems and building teams. and collaborating, but also, you know give some very, like real takeaways, like some frameworks and some approaches. So I like to think we really, like hit a balance of both.
Per Axbom
Excellent. Thanks so much for joining us, guys.
Michael Metts
All right, wow.
Andy Welfle
Yeah, thanks for having us on. It’s been a lot of fun.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I really do like how Michael and Andy have managed to keep the book at a level that makes it usable for lots of different groups of people. It feels like you could actually hand it to your team of devs. They could read it and get practical. You know, the tips from it. At the same time, you could be a UX writer and read it or have it by this by the side you in your desk and it would be really useful.
Per Axbom
That’s a really good point, James, because I mean, of course that speaks to how good they are at what the writing about which, of course, you sort of have to be and to be taken seriously. But I agree they have done a really good job. I’m impressed by how easily accessible it is and how easy it is to flip through and find stuff that, oh, here’s a good example. And here’s a good example and just be inspired by it.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean the cynic in me, maybe we got Well, look, they’re writing a book about writing is designing. If they didn’t manage to make it kind of feel like it’s, it’s accessible by lots of different groups of people. They’ve probably failed with what they’re applying, what they’re actually writing about.
Per Axbom
Right. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I mean. So there’s actually more pressure on them to do it correctly. That way.
James Royal-Lawson
You’re right.
Per Axbom
then other people. Yeah,
James Royal-Lawson
yeah. they’ve, they’ve raised their own bar. But, yeah, they’ve done it really well. It’s good.
Per Axbom
I also really appreciate the humility of it that it’s actually not I mean, I can sometimes get religious in and say things and blurt out things like design first, like we were talking about there. It’s really important that would get designed at first, but what they’re saying it’s no, it’s really important that we cooperate, and that everybody’s involved so that we can work together.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that being intentional was more important than being first. And that’s I do love that practical hands on approach to this. And tied into what I said about you could give this book to developers on your team or that you work with. Maybe think about how, how this ties in with error messages, but also how it ties in with accessibility. One of the things I come across is quite a few designers in my experience, they don’t see some of the accessibility aspects as part of that role. Whereas a lot of the accessibility side of things, especially when it comes to screen readers and Aria implementation. It code stuff that needs to be done. But it involves deciding what words are going to be used to describe things. And what sequence of words?
Per Axbom
Exactly, yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And if you’re developer that’s, well, if you’re not aware of this, you’re not going to do it. But there are often developers who are aware of it and do try and do it and end up putting the words in themselves or deciding which bits of the page or bits of the screen are going to be used as the labels. So they are doing the design of the words for accessibility. Without maybe intentionally doing that, you know, maybe a designer hasn’t helped them or UX writer doesn’t help them. say, Oh, no, this would be much better if you did this order, or if you put that one there, or this points to that label. I think there’s there’s definitely a way that this maybe could help raise the quality of some of the unintentional design work. Developers maybe do.
Per Axbom
Yeah, and that makes me think, I mean, There’s, depending on your right what you write in a button, what you write in an area, label or name field, what you write on a link that triggers that can be triggered by voice. Because some people use assistive technology that is triggered by voice. So if you haven’t decided, what word should trigger that, that will be decided unintentionally, which could potentially destroy things for the future as well, because that will probably carry on into other assistive technology.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I’d like to think that with the amount of chat bots and voice interfaces that have appeared in recent years, that this really has helped raise awareness for designing words, because we were forced into situations where there isn’t much graphical user interface to play with. There aren’t there aren’t so many pretty little coloured things to push pixels around you have to focus on the words. So if we take Michael himself when he was working more as a we would probably call traditional UX designer. Initially, okay, he’s writer as well, but he did a lot more UX work that we’d recognise as UX work. And now he heads the conversational design part of his company doing chatbots. Properly focusing on on the words themselves.
Per Axbom
You know what this makes me think of it when I started playing video games. In the 80s. Some of the first games I was playing, were only text based. They were words on a screen when I got to choose what direction you want to move in. And then the text told me you are in a room you have these paths to go this is what you see. Yeah. And that made me think now that if people who use those games are designing now they probably are better off having that experience realising that there’s so much that can be conveyed with just words.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Do you know what I’m going to? I’m going to tell you a story. I mean, I used to play those games as well. And I remember one of the first games I used to play a text based ones. I think it was called Sphinx was a text based adventure for the for the BBC microcomputer, back in the early 80s probably, and I used to sit and I used to play it with my grandma. Because she okay back then she probably wasn’t a huge amount older than I am now but how we could sit there together and the fact that it was text based mean that you know, the pace you dictated the your own pace of the game. There was nothing, there’s nothing stressing you. You could write, move north, you know, pick up sword, all these kind of things that you would do attack dwarf or whatever it was that you had in the game. And they could work on this together and work out then you discovered the commands. I’d really thought about the connection, back to designing words back then.
Per Axbom
That’s such a good, that’s such a good story about how it actually just bringing it back to the words means that it’s more accessible to a greater number of people.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, nice point. Maybe. I mean, I’m babbling now but one of my stories from my childhood, but it’s always fun to hear everyone else’s stories as well. So if you want to give us some feedback on this interview, or even just share some of your own stories, then please email uxpodcast@uxpodcast.com.
Per Axbom
And thank you for spending your time with us and links and notes from the episode of course, always found online on uxpodcast.com if you can’t find them in your pod playing tool of choice,
James Royal-Lawson
And remember, you can contribute to funding the show by visiting uxpodcast.com/support or volunteering to help with the transcripts. Is also good
Per Axbom
and you’ve found because you’re the one who always finds all these recommend listening episodes, episode 160 a link show I need more sleep. I can’t even remember that.
James Royal-Lawson
You’re probably asleep.
Per Axbom
Yeah. We talked about why your design team should include a writer apparently.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we do. Amongst other things, quite a nice one. We’ve actually talked about words a few times over the years. There’s some you might even remember that one. That webpage that was just words. What was that called?
Per Axbom
Yeah, there was an episode we have that it’s called words words words, I think,
James Royal-Lawson
Episode 50. There you go. Go to bonus one.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb?
Per Axbom
I don’t know James, how many mystery writers does it take to change alight bulb
James Royal-Lawson
Two. One to screw the bulb in almost all the way in, and one to give it a surprising twist at the end.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, Andy Welfle and Michael Metts recorded in January 2020 and published as Episode 231 of UX Podcast.