Three Lessons After 6 Months Using Notion
After six months of playing around with Notion, here’s what I learned.
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Last year, I made a shift in my UX writing business. I started teaching people about the principles I wrote about in my book UX Writing Basics and started teaching copywriters how they could inject some UX into their marketing copy.
In my workshop, UX-Ify Your Copy, I helped writers of all kinds, and designers understand core UX writing principles, showed them how to apply them to their copy, gave them a checklist to review their copy and gave them tips on explaining their copy choices so that the marketing and product teams would understand.
While I know this workshop has been useful to many (it’s got a 5-star rating!), the checklist is just a simple PDF.
After a few months of focusing on all things Notion, I could see the potential to make this checklist more interactive, and as a result, more useful.
No more guessing if your copy is simple enough and ticking that off. Instead, you now get to put in more specific data (in this case, literacy level) and the checklist will tell you how well it does (or not).
How this checklist work
The UX Writing Checklist works thanks to a series of formulas. At first glance it might seem that you can simply “tick” off which principles your copy respects or not, but behind the the scenes you’ll quickly notice that what looks like a checkbox is actually a formula.
What you have to do with this template is to go through each principle (tab) and answer a few questions about the piece of copy you’re reviewing.
How simplicity gets scored
For example, the principle of simplicity relies on measuring the level of literacy of your text.
First, you’ll need to determine the acceptable, or goal literacy level for your product. You might have different levels depending on the type of copy you’re evaluating. I’d expect support documentation for an audience of developers to have a higher level of literacy, compared to support documentation for customers who don’t necessarily have a technical background.
Then, you’ll have to paste your copy into a tool such as Hemingway App to see what your literacy level is. Add that level to your checklist.
The template is made in a way where you’ll then see a “literacy score” and it will translate into a simple result of either “Good” or “Needs work”. In this case, if you’re 75% of the way to a perfect score, it’s good enough. Anything below that needs to be simplified. Also, when the score is “Good”, it means that the first checkbox you can see in the overall UX score is now ticked off.
How other elements get scored
Each element follows a similar structure. First you go to the specific tab. Then you answer some basic question. And finally it spits out a “result” that is being calculate through some formulas.
Within the template you can find demo videos. In the first one, I go through each element and explain them in more details. And in the second video, I show you how you can modify some of the parameters and change what is an acceptable level so that your copy passes as “good enough”.
If you need more support to understand what each principle is about, and see before/after examples, you’ll want to watch the original workshop, UX-Ify Your Copy or you can also read the book UX Writing Basics. Both of these can be purchased as a bundle when you download the template. If you want the book on its own, get it here.
Who this template is for
At first glance, this template obviously for UX writers and content designers. However, from the feedback I’ve gotten of those who already use it, this template is also useful to you if you are:
- A developper who needs a system to help you prioritise which text might needs to be reviewed first by the writers on your team. By taking the time to score the existing copy, you’ll speed up the process for your writers and editors, so you can push your updates live a bit sooner.
- A designer or developer who needs to urgently push an update out that won’t have been reviewed by a writer. Some updates are too urgent to be given a once over by your team of writers. This allows you to take 10-15 minutes and see if you can make a few changes to improve your copy, without a team of writers.
- A copywriter who wants to see if their marketing copy also passes the test for simplicity, brevity, clarity, inclusivity, accessibility and humanity. Good user experience can start with marketing.
- A solo freelancer who wears all the hats and needs to make sure whatever they write helps them create a good user experience. It could be anyone from an accountant, to a business coach, passing by
What else can you do with this?
If you’re already using Notion regularly, there are others ways you could use this template to “supercharge” your writing process.
There are a few properties I haven’t included in this template that might it even more useful. In particular, it might be useful to add the following properties:
- Person - Add an author, editor, approved by
- Date - Published date, Date to be reviewed, Date created
- Status - Draft, To be reviewed, Reviewed, Live, Next to be reviewed
- ID - If you work with a lot of content, adding an automatic ID might help sort out your content more easily.
- Relations - If you already have a content management system in Notion, you might want to create a relation between that system and the checklist to know which pieces of content have been reviewed, and which haven’t.
And if you work with a team that uses Notion for other parts of your business as well, you could also create other databases, and connect them to this template. Types of databases that could be connected include:
- Content management system
- Projects and tasks databases
- Style guide
- Notion Calendar if dates are attached to the content
If you’d like to integrate the checklist into your existing system, or need help to customise your template, this is a service I can help you with. Get in touch with me and after a quick chat, we’ll get your Notion workspace sorted.
Where to get the template
You can get the template, the workshop and the book via my Gumroad shop. And if you’re ready to supercharge it with more customisation, get in touch with me.
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