UX writing scorecards
tl;dr - Using my coding skills, I created a program that allows writers to analyze and share data about their writing.
Background
A common challenge for UX writers is how do we showcase our work and our impact?
How can we best talk about our work with non-writers so they can understand what we do and why it helps the product?
Goals of the project
I wanted to build a tool that would be like a Swiss Army knife - something useful in many situations while still being easy to use.
Before starting, I sat down and created goals for the project:
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Easy to use - either paste text or upload a file
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Showcase all results at once in a dashboard format
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End result is a downloadable pdf that could be shared with stakeholders
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Data to check:
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Basic stats like word count, average words per sentence, etc.
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Reading levels
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Reading ease for non-English speakers
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Reading time for each piece of text
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Word frequency in the top 5000 words
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Include word cloud for word frequency (see Research for more info)
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Results
The resulting tool gives writers two advantages that we didn't have before:
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Provides a way to share and discuss work with non-writers
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Allows writers to identify potential issues
A new way to discuss their work
The scorecard gives writers an unbiased way to discuss their copy.
Here are some example insights in the scorecard:
Sample insight from the scorecard
Sample insight from the scorecard
Sample insight from the scorecard
Sample insight from the scorecard
These types of insights demonstrate to non-writers that we understand our copy. It also gives us a new way to discuss our work - especially for those of us in data-oriented companies.
Identifying potential issues
Along with the scorecard, writers get the raw data analyzed for each sentence. So they can use this to identify sentences with higher grade levels, or many complex words, or whatever metric is important to them.
Also the word cloud often highlighted that certain words or phrases were actually more common than they expected.
Impact of the project:
This tool gave writers and stakeholders a lot of new insights into the work of a writer. It created a space for conversations about data and high-level goals, all while showing off the work and expertise of the writer.