LavaCon Presentation

Emalee Yang - WRIT 4662W
Mike Walkusky- UX Writing and Hip Hop: A Love Story

Summary of UX Writing and Hip Hop: A Love Story

Mike Walkusky is a Senior Content Designer for Intuit, Content Strategist for TurboTax, and freelance sports and entertainment journalist. He came up with the topic of his presentation, UX Writing and Hip Hop: A Love Story, as a way to explain his career in an interesting and non-technical manner. By adding diversity to the UX writing space, Walkusky draws connections from his love of Hip Hop to UX writing. More specifically, Walkusky highlights four key elements that both UX writing and Hip Hop utilize in cultivating meaningful connections to an audience:

• voice
• storytelling
• collaboration
• empathy

Key Takeaways

Walkusky provides fun ways to relate to UX writing, in that both Hip Hop and UX writing require a strong understanding of audience. In the presentation, Walkusky elaborates on the element of voice as the brand; whereas UX writers and Hip Hop artists must generate authenticity and trust within their audience. This may require extensive customer research in creating a brand strategy and voice evolution. The element of storytelling includes the process in which UX writers must create content with purpose of guiding audience members through a particular process. The story being told begins at the start of a task and continues to the end of a task that an audience member successfully completes. This is relatable to Hip Hop, in that storytelling is prevalent among lyrical intonations illustrating hardships. Likewise, collaboration is important within Hip Hop and UX writing. Both Hip Hop artists and UX writers must collaborate with various cross-functional teams in creating an efficient product or song. Finally, empathy is highlighted as empowering audience members. The general concept behind empathy is to deliver with the full intent of the audience in mind. Overall, Walkusky provides a creative lens in describing UX writing.

Reflection

I was genuinely intrigued by Walkusky's "love story" between UX writing and Hip Hop. As a fan of the Hip Hop music genre, I greatly appreciated the music video snippets. I also found the four elements (voice, storytelling, collaboration, and empathy) as strong identifying features of an effective UX writer. As a UX writer, I believe it is important to establish the voice of a product in order to create a compelling story within the product. That is, the storytelling component is key in allowing for audience members to fully engage with a product effectively. Additionally, collaboration is vital to a UX writer, of whom must work with various teams to ensure content consistency. Empathy is an interesting and more approachable concept in understanding the audience members. As UX writers, it is important to put yourself in the audiences' shoes when conducting research and solving problems. The overall concept of empathy fully encompasses relationships between UX writers and the audience.