[ID Discuss] Content strategy - Written aspects of interaction design

[Carrie Ritch]

Andrei writes:
> Interesting you should mention bloggers, because I am increasingly
> convinced of the value of adding excellent writing skills to the pool
> of interaction design breadth.
>
> Not necessarily in terms of writing an essay, but rather to take
> ownership of inline help text, error messages, and labels.  I'd be curious
to
> know if my experiences are unique, but I have found myself time and time
> again working with companies where "copy-writing" is shuffled off to a
> department entirely separate from the interaction/visual design
> studios, where it is clear that the copywriters have shallow to no
knowledge of
> the site or application they are writing copy for.

Working in a small web development company I do not have access to technical
or copy writers so I do write most of the inline help and error messages.

37signals had a great resource on their site called Design Not Found
containing collections of good and bad examples of error and help messages.
You can't access the library of examples anymore, which is too bad, because
they've just recently turned it into a book - "Defensive Design for the Web:
How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points."
http://www.37signals.com/book/

Good writing skills are also needed for writing requirements, specs,
annotating wireframes and anything else used to communicate a solution.

carrie