Clarity over cleverness you want to flex your skills your verbal skills there's places to do that it's usually not in a software interface not in the software that we work on here at service now welcome to another episode of tech bites I'm Bobby bril your host for this episode but more importantly that is Carol Valdez director content design here at service now who is going to give us a look into the world of writing for ux writing for interfaces and a look into this new way of writing with AI and Carol it seems that writing has become more specialized and that these AI tools are really changing the way we write is is that a correct assumption yeah you have to really be more than a writer like a good communicator what is it that you really want to say right you can fill a screen or the the air with words but are they the right words right you know we've been in the business of teaching machines to speak for a long time right and now it has a bit more of its own power right so that doesn't necessarily mean that it can say the right words or know what you're driving towards so having that human in the loop who really has that judgment around like what's the need we're trying to meet and are we meeting it with these words here so it's always been a puzzle but now you have another variable in the puzzle so you have almost like a partner but a a partner that needs your wisdom it needs your human judgment a really smart Apprentice super eager right eager and maybe uh it doesn't have as much ego as maybe a human partner would and you can kind of push a little bit more than you would with a human Apprentice so in some ways it's kind of a fun partner cuz it removes that sensitivity maybe that you might have with a creative partner but you know certainly both are are needed in in the world that we live in before we get into the weeds tell us about your team and where they fit into the creation process here at service now yeah so I lead content design at service now within the experience organization in product design there are some subdisciplines so you have a standard product designer who typically handles the interactions and then you have visual designers who think about the Aesthetics and and the visual layout and then you have content designers who handle the words within the UI currently we're about 15 people on the team and we engage with our product Partners to create experiences that are highly usable and the words are the part that we're responsible for and really meeting the information needs of users as they make their way through our products so this is not technical writing correct we're at the point of need when they're engaging with that product and they need a little nudge or a queue or something to help them move along so if they have a top of mind question that's going to keep them from moving along we try to anticipate that and fill that need with with some some text that that gives them that confidence kind of akin to outside in the real world out of our computers this is like wayfinding almost correct yeah it is it's definitely I often drive around the freeways here in Southern California and think the best UI writing is on the street sence right because it has to do things at scale and it has to show people where to go so it it definitely is finding your way helping people find their way and that's got to be a challenge when you're writing with one word two words oh my gosh five at the most is probably yeah you know a novel at this point for your side of writing totally and everybody has opinions about words right because they you know we we know how all know how to read and write so we always say that we spent 80% of our time investigating the right words and 20% of the time actually writing them to get down to just a couple words or a handful of words there's a lot of pressure on those words so you can't just whimsically say I think it should say this you have to go back to those those needs we're trying to meet what is it that a user really needs to know and what is going to be crystal clear to the most people so we're trying to accommodate particularly those new users to reduce that complexity and you we've all looked at a screen and gone I don't know what to do here right and you shut down your your confidence goes and you might just leave right and that's never how we want anyone to feel we want them to feel like oh there's there's help here there's guidance and and we're going to help you through it you made a really interesting point and I think it's very pertinent to the service now aspect of how the service now product is working is it's a lot of new users it's a lot of non IT workers and a lot of not people with no it background this low code no code you don't understand what those words necessarily mean if you don't have the background how do you determine these words to get users to follow the actions you want them to take so we want to try to get as close as possible to the language they use as we make those decisions it really requires a lot of listening so we're always looking to identify some listening posts on how people are talking about the subject matter the task at hand it's pretty revealing to what you think is clear for everyone and then you realize putting it in front of users getting people's reactions even before you get to that Spen level there's a lot of outside the interface work you're reading testing you're exploring and then you come up with you know your short list of what you think is useful and then you try to get that into the the screens and and put that in front of actual users which is really that takes the subjectivity out of it right like you're you have you have these folks who are telling you and I've had multiple times where I've had a PM or a partner say oh this is what it should say and this is what it should say and so rather than argue with them I'm open to saying yes let's test that even though I might have a strong opinion or something you put it out there and and the winner reveals itself right there so you know I I think in movies and we all do and especially if you're a writer you're always trying to pull those great quotes it's kind of like you know do you say the lights are on or do you say illuminate yeah and we always say Clarity over CL Burness you want to flex your skills your verbal skills and and there's places to do that it's usually not to do it in in a software interface not in the software that we work on here at service now very we try to stay solution focused and they're starting from here we don't want to get in the way of getting to that point we believe that everyone understands that word illuminate but it it's not true right there are people who it might give them pause and give that break and their flow if you didn't notice the words on the screen oh wow then you did a great job it seems like it was a seamless transaction right you just took your steps and you sailed right through that's an interesting way of looking at because that's got to be very difficult from a writing perspective to write invisible something as simple as the cancel button has a lot more weight and feeling to this than we would think explain that yeah so obviously words can have different meanings right and typically cancel is something that's used to say no I don't I didn't want to do that like I didn't want to do that but imagine you're in interface so you say you want to cancel a meeting so I get a popup modal that says cancel beating question mark and typically you'd have two buttons at the bottom and one that would confirm the action and one that would cancel the action but what happens when cancelling is the action that you're wanting to confirm so you can't say cancel and cancel right so you're breaking your pattern so then you would say yes cancel meeting and then close right so you have to use a variation on it so there's these little puzzles that sometimes can give designers or people like oh no what what is that word what is that one word that's the right word here that happens in more places than you can imagine and you're always like oh when I get a new one I'm always like wow that's a tricky one you might have to have the the team swarm on it to say I don't know I can't figure this one out so you throw it off to another perspective and that makes a lot of sense when you point it out that way but it it seems like there's a lot of effort going into this for something so simple how does that translate into the flow of the product if you've ever been through a clunky experience you know that you're not quite sure so you're there's something blocking you because you didn't the time wasn't taken to figure out confusion what might be confusing or or open questions that weren't answered has to be a tone to this right there has to be a way of speaking to the person you're guiding correct how how does that work we want to follow our brand voice right so we're always wanting to come across as service now right that's our personality we are service now so in our products probably the Ser more serious side of of your personality you're you know down to business right you're trying to get stuff done so you're going to focus on that part of our brand personality and and make it feel like service now but when we're we're a trusted partner so it's the trust is super important here because if you're just hanging out and chitchatting with the company you know not so much pressure on it when you're trying to do your job to be to be that partner you need to be trusted so we definitely are looking for those things that are getting folks to to believe that it's all going to turn out okay it adds to a layer of complexity to the words that we're choosing because the words matter right every word be will be reflective of our personality but also communicative for what's happening and we definitely don't want to go into that like what we call an uncanny valley where we're trying to be too much too chummy and too like a human like I said if we were that invisible helper that would be the best thing goes back to that trust idea that you mentioned that I I as you're saying it I I can think and I think everybody else can can think of an instance like the tone Chang is like wait a minute did the expert leave the room did they take a break what just happened now I'm totally lost and confused now let's shift gears because now how does that work when you've got to sit down and write and think about how the customer feels walk us briefly through that how that how that works ideally we'd be co-designing right the idea of the code design is that your partners might have ideas on the words and we might have ideas on the interactions and how we get through it so so that conjoined brain is a benefit there because we don't own the words and everybody we're looking for the right words so it's a collaborative thing and then you might need a Mild to Wild exploration like what if we tried it like this I've sat with designers and and played around with some treatments and they had like an aha moment and said wow you do the same thing with words that I do with with a visual treatment so you know this idea that it's just one and done it comes out no it it's it's an ongoing thing luckily we do have a lot of established patterns not every problem we're solving is a novel one we've identified a lot of ways to handle these we've created a style bide that has has all of it cified and and what we know at the moment so showing examples and that of course sets up the big asterisk in the room that we're all excited about and utilizing so how does AI come into this role so using a tool using AI tools to help with that is is glorious right it's so it really does allow us to scale our contribution in a way that has always been a challenge for for our particular design discipline there's very few of us and as I mentioned there's words on every screen and even the tiniest of words take a lot of brain power so now you got a synthetic brain on your side to help you not only go from do those Mild to Wild Explorations but also feel more confident that our guidance is being followed and that are we're creating a more consistent experience it also allows us to move a bit faster it's not even the writing part of it it's more of the scoping of those information needs where it's it's going broad it can go broader than than even our Collective brains can go at speed right you can also compile all those research studies that have been done and particular area some if there are any uh papers industry papers you can create a little knowledge graph of all that you know a little Corpus we call it of knowledge that's going to add to the model and have even more context more service now context it's our intellectual property and we don't want to put that out into a broader model so now we have an ability to say O Let's synthesize all this and see how it applies to what we're trying to solve for so it it just gives us a way bigger brain so our writing has become it's about like producing writing we're kind of showing our showing our math like showing the math behind our process and codifying it in a prompt to say okay let's now let's feed this into the AI and see what comes out of it for new writers is there a couple of takeaways that you think will benefit them based off of your experience well terminology is is a huge one that we have particular words within lots of different Industries we can take these terms and explore them deeper and more quickly so again it's that speed of exploration that's this again allows you to go how could I say that more simply how could I say that more simply and you can have that partner as the AI that a creative partner that's going to help you go in different directions so you can take all those requirements you can take all those all that research you can feed it into the machine and then allow it to prod um words that then you still are ultimately the owner of right it's a great time to be a ux writer to be a Content designer because it it frees you up to do all the parts of the process that you really like so there you have it a peak into the collaborative nature of content creation and the valuable role that AI plays in scaling and enhancing the content design process and of course for even more answers on working with the service now platform head over to our YouTube channel to learn more if you've enjoyed this episode please hit subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on so you never miss an episode I'm Bobby bril thanks for listening