Starting out as a copywriter in the late 90s after learning the craft from seasoned writers, absorbing brand positioning concepts from Jack Trout and Al Ries, copy and idea crafting concepts from the writings of Ogilvy, Bernbach, Jim Aitchinson etc. and other marketing frameworks from Philip Kotler, now in the second decade of the 21st century, you come face-to-face with IT and UX.
Now your craft is a sub-set of a larger process – the user-experience process layered over the software development life cycle (SDLC). The process is more analytical than the spontaneous creativity of your previous avatar. How do you cross-over? Can your love for ideation and the writing craft fit into this very engineering-like process?
Somewhere you find it losing its humanness with all its talks of “users” and “personas” and “journeys” and “moods” – concepts which you had sub-consciously used for crafting communication pieces in the previous era. The whole ecosystem of this industry feeds on this jargon and runs like a machine. Copywriters or for that matter anybody with a bit of interest can learn the processes and techniques as it is not rocket science exactly. Is it possible to achieve the same goal without depending on UX processes? Maybe not advisable. But UX teams can recognise the importance a copywriter can bring to the design process, instead of someone who just fills in the words.
Copywriters can be the top most layer after the UX Layer which in turn is layered over the SDLC. Each screen of the digital product being designed/developed can be given a metaphorical/allegorical makeover by ideators/copywriters (eg. The Digital Content Cafe). Telecom consumer service providers can package their plans, add-ons and value-added services using the metaphor of a McDonald combo meal – which majority of us easily grasp, even kids. But are we human enough to be child-like in our approach? Or enmeshed in our sophisticated complexities do we shrug off these creative approaches as primitive?
By the way, googling “hx human experience” throws up results fresh from 2017…so there seems to be a conscious movement towards hx happening.
