UX writing 101, and why it matters in marketing

Thomas Chan · Bilingual content strategist and UX writer

8 years across fintech, crypto, eCommerce, NGOs, banking and insurance

PMI-ACP® certified. MA International Public Affairs, HKU and MComm in Marketing, UNSW

6 September 2026 · 9 min read · LinkedIn →

Watch someone land on a page you wrote. They don't start at the top and read down. Their eyes hit the headline, skid across the first line or two, drop down the left edge and then they decide whether to stay. All of it in about the time it takes to read this sentence.

In integrated and content marketing, we write for a reader who doesn't exist: patient, sequential, interested from the first word. The reader who actually turns up is scanning, half-committed, and one tap from leaving. So who are we really writing for?

This guide is about writing for the reader who actually turns up, and converting them.

What is UX writing?

Sarah Winters founded Content Design London after leading the team that consolidated 400+ UK government websites into GOV.UK. She defines the parent discipline in one line: content design is "answering a user need in the best way for the user to consume it." UX writing is that same principle, applied sentence by sentence.

Her book with Rachel Edwards, Content Design, defined my career in content and made everything I do possible.

UX writing is the practice of writing the words inside a product or a piece of content so a person can act on them without stopping to figure out what they mean. Beyond the obvious body text and headers, it covers button labels, error messages, onboarding steps, headlines, subject lines and even ad copy. The job is clarity, followed by personality, and its lens can widen past pure interface work. A UX writer's real client is the reader's next five seconds, not the brand's tone-of-voice document or fancy ad slogans.

How people actually read

We tend to write for a reader who reads. Most readers don't.

Nielsen Norman Group's original 2006 eyetracking study, later revisited in a follow-up study, recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of web pages and found a consistent F-shaped scanning pattern: two horizontal sweeps across the top of the content, then a vertical drift down the left edge as attention fades. On average, users read only 20-28% of the words on a page.

That's not a design failure to fix. It's the actual condition every piece of marketing copy is written under. The words at the very top of a page, an email, or a popup do almost all of the work; everything below the fold is read by whoever's still interested enough to keep scanning.

This isn't just a Western phenomenon. I wrote about exactly this for Content Design London: high-context markets like Hong Kong, mainland China and Japan tolerate, and often expect, a denser page than low-context markets like the UK or US do. Even so, they scan by the same principle, working through a much thicker deck of options to find what they need and ignore the rest. That makes "clear" itself a moving target depending on who is reading, which is the whole subject of the localisation guide.

The F-shaped scan pattern: two horizontal passes across the top, then a vertical drift down the left edge. Everything in grey is what most readers never really see.

How this relates to other forms of writing

The same scanning behaviour shows up whether someone's reading UX copy, a PR release or a landing page. Readers everywhere are looking for the same three things: can I tell what this is about quickly, can I tell what to do next, and is it worth my remaining attention. Every writing discipline that survives contact with a real reader ends up converging on the same instinct. UX writing, journalism, ad copy. Say the important thing first.

It comes down to clarity, a lighter workload for the reader, and conversion that follows from both.

UX writing in the context of integrated marketing communications

Writing for integrated marketing is about fitting the purpose. Whether it's a paid ad at launch, a retargeting campaign, an SEO blog post or a landing page, the writing has to fit the format it'll actually be read in, and be built to convert there rather than to sound good in a document.

That's why UX writing principles matter for marketing comms specifically. They force the copy to start from user intent and think in the user's shoes, which makes the content relevant and, over time, authoritative. Once that's right, the technical execution has something worth carrying: where the ad gets placed, how it's tracked, what shows up in the SERP, how easy the page is to scan.

How to make your copy clear

So how do you actually make copy clear? Three questions, applied to every piece of copy regardless of format:

Context: who is the user, and what do they already know, want, or feel right at this moment?

Purpose: what is this specific piece of copy actually trying to do?

Inverted pyramid: list out everything a stakeholder wants said, sort it by relevance to that user in that context, and cut whatever doesn't earn its place on the page.

This isn't theory for me. When I introduced structured A/B testing into Bybit's content workflow, rewriting a landing page around reassurance rather than description took conversions to 7%. A popup test in the same programme lifted conversion by 38%. Same product, same traffic, same offer. Only the words changed.

During the same period, when I wrote ad copy for the performance marketing team, I worked through three things in order. First, who's the segment? What are they looking for, and what do they actually need? Second, what does the landing page say, and what's the campaign really about? Third, how do I make the copy punchy enough to work with the visuals so the user clicks without hesitating? I wouldn't deliver anything until all three were answered and joined up.

SEO work runs on the same logic. Say a page is ranked, drawing traffic, with both SEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation, the practice of getting content cited by AI answer engines rather than just ranked in search results) done, and conversion still isn't where it should be. The fix usually isn't "add more CTAs". More often the copy needs to state the business value proposition earlier, instead of relying on a conclusion nobody scrolls to. Sometimes the page needs an interactive element that lets the user see the message rather than read another paragraph about it.

UX writing is what turns a product's message into a tagline and a landing page that map to what the user needs, not just what the brand wants to say.

The three questions, in order

Step 1: Context

Who is the user, and what do they already know, want, or feel right at this moment? This is the question most copy skips. A reader arriving from a paid ad has different knowledge and different patience than someone who found the same page through search, and the copy has to account for that before it does anything else.

A real example: Bybit Earn

When I ran integrated marketing for Bybit Earn, UX writing principles were the fastest way for me to work out what users wanted and what they were worried about. That gave me the baseline clarity for what would actually drive consideration and conversion: stable growth during a crypto bear market, and rising interest in digital assets among traditional investors who'd never held any before.

I then used that same principle to build every format in the campaign, including webinar talking points, SEO articles, the social media calendar and in-app copy. Each one started from what the user wanted to hear, what funnel stage they were at, and which channel was doing the talking.

Channel	Funnel stage	What the copy had to do
Webinar	Awareness	Explain the benefit and mechanism, and build trust in the format
SEO articles	Consideration	Go in-depth on why it works, for someone already comparing options
Social and paid	Awareness	Build hype while establishing stability as the core message
In-app	Conversion	Be clear, concise and benefit-led (assets under management, annual percentage rate), and easy to navigate

What this looks like on a real page

Two Hong Kong fintech calculators make the point better than any principle can. I pulled both apart field by field, and the full teardown with a rebuild spec sits in the companion asset.

Endowus's calculator asks ten inputs, including an expected return figure most retail investors can't supply. Bowtie's asks four, all facts about yourself, and answers instantly. NN/g's cognitive-load research is blunt about why that matters: every field a user must interpret raises abandonment risk. The rebuild eliminates the guesswork fields, defaults the rest, and shows the number people actually came for.

The point of all of it

The job of UX writing is simple to state. Make your user think as little as possible, which is Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think* in a sentence. Make conversion and navigation as easy as you can. Once your team internalises that, integrating channels gets easier, and you stop having to argue for the results.

Marketing teams tend to treat UX writing as a specialism that belongs to the product org. I'd argue the opposite. The reading behaviour that UX writing exists to handle (scanning, skimming, deciding in seconds) doesn't stop at the product boundary. It's the same person reading your ad, your landing page and your onboarding flow, in the same hurried way, on the same phone.

So the three questions are worth asking everywhere. Who is this person and what do they already know? What is this specific piece of copy for? And of everything the business wants to say here, what actually earns its place?

Answer those honestly and most of the technical work downstream gets easier, because you're no longer optimising a page that was never clear to begin with. Get them wrong and nothing downstream saves you. Not keyword research, not retargeting budget, not schema markup. Your reader stopped reading before any of it mattered.

Is UX writing the same as copywriting?

They overlap but aren't identical. Copywriting is usually judged on persuasion and voice; UX writing is judged on whether someone can act on the words without friction. In marketing, the strongest work does both at once.

Does UX writing only apply to apps and websites?

No. The same context → purpose → inverted pyramid method applies to an ad, an email subject line, or a print headline. Anywhere a reader has to decide what to do next based on a small number of words.

How do I know if my copy is actually clear, not just short?

Short and clear aren't the same thing. Test it against purpose: if a reader can state back what action they're meant to take after reading it once, it's clear. If they need to re-read it, it isn't, no matter the word count.

Clarity is the strategy

The channels will keep changing. Paid social today, agentic search tomorrow. The reader's behaviour underneath them won't. People scan, they skim the top, and they act on whatever earns their attention in the first pass. UX writing is just the discipline of designing for that reality instead of hoping it isn't true.