10 tools for UX writers and content designers

Like many others working in content design, my career started in a different discipline: journalism, to be exact. And while a number of the skills I’d learned as a journalist — interviewing, researching, writing, editing — translated well to content design, there were a number of others I had to learn.

Sarah Winters (formerly Richards), author of the book Content Design, defines content design like so:

Content Design . . . is about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect.

It’s not enough to be a good writer. Or journalist, for that matter. To succeed as a content designer, you must be able to understand and address the needs of your audience. To do this, you must be equipped to collect, interpret, and act upon data and evidence.

Here are some of the tools I rely on to understand my audience and craft content that addresses their needs.

Readable

Readable measures the readability of your text and issues a letter grade. Memories of high school report cards aside, it’s a great tool for checking to ensure that your content will be accessible to your audience. Not only does it flag common issues like lengthy sentences, adverbs, cliches, and passive voice, it also estimates the percentage of your audience that will be able to read your content.

Alternative: Hemingway Editor

Frontitude

Frontitude is a tool for managing UX copy and collaborating with visual designers. It’s compatible with both Sketch and Figma, and allows you to push copy updates directly to a design file. No more marking up screenshots or sending design files back and forth.

Perhaps best of all, Frontitude makes it easy to keep your copy consistent. Instead of changing the same copy in multiple places, you only have to update it once.

Alternatives: Ditto, Strings

Miro

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t use Miro. Part of what makes it so great is its flexibility. Need to create a quick wireframe? Miro can do that. Need to host a collaborative design session or present flows to stakeholders? It can do that too. The possibilities are endless with this digital whiteboard.

I find the prebuilt templates within Miro especially handy. With templates for everything from flowcharts to product roadmaps, you can spend less time formatting and more time creating.

Alternatives: Mural, Whimsical, FigJam

User Interviews

User Interviews takes the hassle out of recruiting research participants. With a pool of participants at the ready, recruiting is as simple as setting your screener criteria, launching the study, and waiting for applicants to start trickling in.

Using their screener, you can target highly specific demographics or recruit participants who are representative of the general population. They will automatically drop confirmed interviews in your calendar and provide a Zoom link. They will even distribute Amazon gift cards to your participants at the conclusion of the interview, if you so choose.

A process that used to take days or weeks now takes hours. When recruiting is this easy, there’s really no excuse for not involving users in every stage of your design process.

Alternative: Userlytics

MarkUp

Sometimes, things get lost in translation. When they do, tools like MarkUp are especially good at facilitating conversation and getting things back on track.

I find MarkUp particularly helpful when reviewing the developed versions of designs. Rather than going back and forth over email or scheduling a meeting, you can annotate the page in question and and share your feedback.

Alternative: Pastel

Hotjar

Hotjar is an essential tool for collecting feedback on your published web content. Inject a single line of code on your site, and you’ll be able to collect heat maps, screen recordings, and survey results.

With Hotjar, you can get a comprehensive picture of how users are engaging with your content, including valuable metrics like scroll depth and click counts.

Alternative: Crazy Egg

OptimalSort

OptimalSort is one of a number of UX research tools offered by Optimal Workshop. With it, you can create open or closed card sorting exercises and share them with your users. The tool automatically captures analytics and produces a number of time-saving reports.

Optimal Workshop also offers a suite of other tools to help with your information architecture design, including tree testing and first click testing tools.

Alternative: UXtweak

Maze

Maze allows you to run unmoderated tests with your prototypes.

It’s compatible with major prototyping tools, including Sketch, Figma, InVision, Adobe XD, and Marvel. Clickable elements that you define in your prototyping software of choice transfer seamlessly to Maze.

With Maze, you can supplement your prototype with surveys, open ended responses, and more.

Test participants can be recruited from within Maze. When they finish (or fail to finish) the task you’ve assigned them using the prototype, you’ll receive a polished report feature heat maps, usability scores, and drop off rates.

Alternative: Useberry

SEM Rush

Part of giving your audience “what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect” means showing up in search results for relevant queries.

I’ve worked on a number of SEO projects in my career, ranging from major site migrations to technical and on-page optimizations for local businesses. Throughout, SEM Rush has been an indispensable tool.

You can cobble together much of what SEM Rush provides using a combination of Google Search Console and Google Ads. But what sets SEM Rush apart is their combination of link building, competitive analysis, and keyword research tools.

Alternative: DeepCrawl

Notion

Notion is not a UX writing or content design tool per se — but it’s essential for anyone looking to organize, track, and archive their work.

I used to do a lot of my UX writing in notebooks (call me old fashioned). But notebooks aren’t exactly easy to search. I’ve wasted more time than I care to admit digging through old Moleskines looking for that clever turn of phrase I swore I wrote down last week . . .

I use Notion to keep track of my tasks, write copy, create content calendars, share requirements with developers, save links I want to read later, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.

Notion also plays nicely with Miro and a growing number of other applications. User journeys, wire flows, and research that you complete in Miro can be embedded directly in Notion, which is great for sharing information across teams.

Alternative: Jira

Disclaimer: I have not received compensation for mentioning any of these tools.