How UX Writing and Content Design Moves Metrics at Duolingo with Mary van Ogtrop

Speaker A: I think that in the content design industry we're always talking about we can impact products, we can impact user outcomes and user sentiment. Well, this is a way to do that on a grander scale. This is Writers in Tech, a podcast where today's top content strategists, UX writers and content designers share their well kept industry secrets.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome to Writers in Tech, a podcast brought to you by the UX Writing Hub. The UX Writing Hub is a company that help people to get into the field of UX writing and content design. We produce a very big conference in Copenhagen in September. We're relaunching our UX Writing Academy course in the beginning of July and we're doing a lot of cool things. And today we have a very special guest. She works as a director of Product writing at Duolingo and her name is Marie Van Oaktrop. Marie, how are you? Super excited to have you here.

Speaker A: Oh, I'm great. It's first thing Monday morning and this is a great way to get the brain going and have a great week. Thanks for having me here.

Speaker B: Thank you for being here. I was very excited towards this interview, so I'm very happy to have you here today. All right, so a lot of apps out there essentially offer the same core functionality, but the way they frame the experience through language can make one feel magical. Okay. And the other one like a troll.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: How do you see UX writing as a differentiator in a crowded market, like the market of language learning, for example?

Speaker A: That's a great question. I think about delightful experiences all the time. I worked for Duolingo. I've worked for Duolingo for a long time. And making it fun is definitely a core, core like principle for us. It's actually a principle in writing make it fun. And the reason for that is not just because we want to make things that are make products and product experiences that are engaging, but what we're doing. Getting people to learn new things, that is inherently challenging. There are inherently obstacles to wanting to do something that's challenging. And what we try to do for the product is make it rewarding to give you a clap on the back for showing up and doing this thing that is not required. This is purely fun for you and purely helping you get to what, whatever your stated goal is with learning. And UX writing definitely plays a big piece in that in terms of the written feedback you get, that could be as simple as way to go. Duo showing up saying, you made that look easy. See you tomorrow. That kind of thing. But I think that Duolingo aside, that UX writing for any company is an extension of your brand. Even copy that's like orientative in nature, trying to get you from one part of the product to another reflects the brand and its tone and word choice. So, like, you can think in terms of simple microcopy. Like if you are submitting some form, does your CTA say submit? Does it say let's go? And those words say the same thing, but they make people feel differently. And in terms of like, finding ways to differentiate your product, it all gets down to how you make people feel. I think the way you make people feel when they're using your product is the greatest differentiator of all. And UX writing is like a key part of that.

Speaker B: You know, I feel like there is something that is very magical about the communication of Duolingo, starting with the social media, the product itself.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker B: And how even those are connected to each other in a way that like, it feels like, uh, you're communicating with the same thing.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: With the same type of character.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So how can you. What's your tip for creating that type of consistency across the whole company? Which is a challenge, by the way, that I have with my clients these days, where user acquisition speaks A, product speaks B, and I try to bridge both of them and it's not working most a lot of the times.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think back where the sausage is made. We're in different teams, we're in different departments. But over on the other side, for our users or learners, we call them, it's just Duolingo. And so that is, we just have to communicate like wild. And I think one of the best ways to communicate is just have it written down document. And so my team does a ton of that. So I lead product writing at Duolingo. So my remit is the product experience using the app. And my team is actually quite small. It always has been. We've always been a tight, small group of people working on the product experience. And what we do is over communicate as, uh, writers tend to and have a lot of guidelines, some of which are AI fueled. And we can talk about that more if you'd like to. But we're chiefly keeping in mind across the company that, you know, duo shouldn't mean one thing in the product and another thing out in social. This is all duo. And if he feels not in keeping with the other experience. And that's something that we can work on, but it really gets down to documentation and communication as an internal Team,

Speaker B: what would be a tip for making that documentation available? Like, what's the process of checking even the documentation?

Speaker A: Well, wherever I've worked is just check it, review it. We have a pretty tight and sharp review process before things go live in the product. And I think that's something to really, for me to stay focused on in this world of AI. And we're all kind of wrapping our heads around it, generating a whole lot of really amazing things that would. The volume would not have been possible. But on the other end, before things go live, is to still maintain your same kind of structures. And what's the word? I. What's the word I want to use Quality of review to make sure that you feel really, really good about everything that you're pushing live. Because the second that quality starts to slip, then possibly user, uh, sentiment could start to slip too. And that's the last thing we want.

Speaker B: And what makes a quality review, like, if you had to break it down

Speaker A: to a system, oh, does it sound like us? Does it actually, maybe this is what I should lead with. Does it meet the moment? That should be the, like, mantra for UX writing, or product writing as we call it here in the duo verse. The writing needs to meet the moment. Not only help people to get where they're trying to do, accomplish what they're trying to accomplish, but have the writing that they see be in keeping with whatever they're experiencing, whether that is, oh, shoot, error, or, oh, my gosh, I just practiced Spanish for the first time and this is a breakthrough moment for me. And the product should almost be able to intuit what I would be feeling and show some words that reflect back to you what your emotions are.

Speaker B: Love it. Meet the moment. This is something I like to meet the moment to bookmark. I always call it, like, contextualize. Like, what's the context here? Am I meeting the right context? How does this person feel right now in that specific context? Yeah, they're sad, happy, confused, or it's very. You really need to dive in, like, into that specific moment.

Speaker A: Right, right. If I could go back six years and change when I first, there's the opportunity to go to Duolingo and work on the product writing. And of course, I downloaded the app six years ago. It was a popular thing, but not what it is now. But I downloaded the app and, and it said, choose a language. Um, because we were only offering languages at the time, now we have a bevy of other subjects to learn. But I chose Dutch, which is my dad's native language, and it had always seemed like a bridge too far to learn this language, get a book. They didn't have really classes to learn Dutch, so I chose that. And I did my first exercise. It said how to say hello or dog or something. And I got it right. And there's a little bit of writing at the bottom. And it said, you are correct. No punctuation. I mean, it was. It affirmed that I was correct, but it did not meet the moment for me. And I, like, screenshotted it. I was like, I think there's an opportunity for me to do something at this place. Because, yeah, it was a watershed moment for me. A little bit of an emotional moment to connect with my family's heritage. And the product didn't qu. Quite reflect that. It did not reflect it. So actually, one of the first things that I did at the company, I just grabbed a product manager. I was like, you know when you get something right and it says that you're right in the most robotic way, what if we zhuzh that up? So he's like, interesting, okay. And we did it and came up with all these variants that are like, nice job, awesome, great, etc. And it was a metrics win. I forget what the numbers were, but it was like, huh? All right, copy, let's go. So that was a moment of meeting the moment, and that leading to business success. So it doesn't have to be one or the other. You don't have to have increased user sentiment or the business doing well. That was a spot where the words did both. Why not both?

Speaker B: That's amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Do you have other examples of business metrics that are measured via, uh, copy. Via writing?

Speaker A: Yeah. Any product has its core metrics, whether it's bookings or daus and divisions within them. The product is trying to achieve those, and therefore the words are too. My. My team of writers is doing the same. And lots of examples. If you were to look at the product now versus six years ago or even two or three years ago, you would see lots of small moments that really add up, bringing a little bit of a cultural sensibility. That's something that we play with without getting too niche, because then you can alienate people. If I were to climb on top of a mountain and scream out, which I guess that's what LinkedIn is for, but the words can and do move numbers because it's an extension of anything else you're trying to do on a product. Yeah.

Speaker B: Lately we've been trying to kind of invest in market education when it comes to hiring Ux writers working closely with UX writers because it seems like some companies still overlook that topic, that subject. They're like, oh, copy, we don't really need that. We have ChatGPT as a placeholder. We have. The designers could do that. Oh, you know what, let's just do the wireframes and put some copy into it later. So what will be like, I'm just asking for advice here, but what will be your tips for like doing that type of market education? What type of things we could show? So more people would say, oh, yeah, this is something we need right now.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, this is an evolving. This is an evolving question or it's an evolving answer, I suppose. I think something that I've heard very well put is clear writing represents clear thinking. And I would say that the quality of the writing is only as good as the quality of what you're asking it to do. And so I've certainly played around with GPT and sometimes I will be trying to put something into the perfect two words or three words for a little headline and I will ask ChatGPT to give me something and it will get me out of the corner I'm in, but it won't be the finished thing. It will just unblock, um, me and lead to other creative wording. And I don't want to shortchange the other roles that are in the product space, but I do think that writers are the best molders of the words, regardless of the tools you're using. But AI can just help you generate en masse. It can two things. I think it can help you generate a whole bunch of the thing. And one and two, it can help you get out of the corner you're in creatively or sense making. So I'm kind of speaking of getting out of a corner. And now I feel like this answer is going wild. But I do think that if it's clear writing has to represent clear thinking, then writers are still the ones to arrive at the clearest way of even describing the problem to an LLM, um, to then help you generate more of it.

Speaker B: Like doing conversation design in a way for the prompts.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh. I've seen the people who are the best, like prompt designers or writers, because it's writing. It is writing. Of course, a prompt is a style guide, if I may. It's a style guide for,

Speaker B: uh, one,

Speaker A: um, output or, uh, one kind of output. And in term, leave it to a writer to come up with to notice all the granular pieces that need to be identified and defined. Also coming up with the examples that one does not simply run a prompt, you gotta design the thing. So yeah, I think because I'm a

Speaker B: writer as well, it comes quite naturally to me the way I communicate with the machine.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And some people could see it. That's why I decided to do this like new Instagram social thing where I call it Humans of AI where I just like ask people three questions and one of them would be like, how do you use AI creatively? Because you wouldn't believe each person in the world, whether if they're like carpenters or writers or teachers like my mom, they will tell you a completely different answer about using AI. Some use it to analyze their dreams. Some use it to kind of take their thoughts and to make it as a coherent ideas. Some use it to plan trips, some use it to get some recipes to feed their seven month old baby. So I found that quite inspiring myself. And um, yeah, the best type of people that communicate with the machines are people that just are really great at just communicate their thoughts, their ideas. Writers basically.

Speaker A: Yeah. Heard and aligned totally. And I think, I mean one finding perhaps is that engineers, product managers, et cetera, will find themselves, themselves designing prompts, writing prompts, and perhaps that they find themselves leaning on the writerly types in their midst. Maybe that's a uh, product writer, content designer, whatever they call themselves. If not, they're going to, they are going to recognize, they're going to recognize the need for clear writing. I think the need for clear writing as a way to articulate what you're trying to get, that's going to be a finding from this time in the universe.

Speaker B: But don't you think that the AI sometimes can take my not so clear writing and make it clear? You know what I mean?

Speaker A: Oh, sure. Yes. Yeah. It's getting smarter. The robots are getting smarter. They're eating their Wheaties. I've. I've found even just like over six months. Yeah. I have another funny story for you actually, if I may. I'm full of funny stories, especially after two cups of coffee. But a few years ago I was on maternity leave, the back half of 2022 and I came back to work. I want to say it was like January 7, 2003 and suddenly GPT4 was like, hey Mary, welcome back. Also, we have some stunning technological updates for you to in your time as you get back to work to learn about and wrap your head around. I was like, what? It felt like if you know the story of Rip Van Winkle, this is kind of Like a parable who is a, uh, character in a story who fell asleep in like 1770 in the United States and he woke up 20 years later in 1790. And before that the United States had been colonies, and after that it was a whole, whole ass country. And so that's kind of how I felt that I had taken a snooze on work and came back and everything was different. And it's remained that way for two and a half years now. But to your point, it is getting smarter. The tools are evolving rapidly and the way we need to scale up and level up and understand them, that is accelerating for sure as well.

Speaker B: And you were saying something about the way that you use A.I. in, uh, your work. So if you would like to dive into that. So I'd love to dive into that.

Speaker A: Like, sure, I can answer that in a professional way and in a personal way. Personally. No, I'll answer professionally. First is my team is small, as I've always said, and forever and ever we were kind of over tasked. Which is why I know writing is so important is because teams always wanted to work with us, needed to work with us, but there were few of us. And just picture like a cartoon of people tearing their hair out trying to do it all. And the answer could have been prioritize, but everything was really important at the same time. And then AI came along and my team, product writing embraced it pretty early because we saw an opportunity. So yes, instead of. Much of the industry was fearful, might be too.

Speaker B: They were cautious.

Speaker A: Cautious, yeah. Picture a raised eyebrow. That was, that was a skeptical look the industry have. And we were like, ooh, this could help us. So my team built a tool in partnership with engineers. We built a tool to help. We call it an AI powered product writer that teams around the company can lean on. It's called Copybot. There you go. They can use that. It's self service. It is trained by my team. It's got like product sense baked in. And I would say that what it produces for you is really good. I want it to be exceptional. And that's what we're working on now. But it has greatly reduced our burden of trying to do everything. And it has basically scaled what we know. We've kind of pivoted from being writers of everything to being tastemakers and saying here everyone have a piece of what we know without us having to do every single thing. Thing. So it's beautiful. Yes, thank you. And I think it's been kind of galvanizing for other teams across the company to See that and see what's possible not just with tools, but with attitude about it. And then on the personal side, I should probably use it more often, I'll be honest. And, um, I was actually brainstorming this morning. What can I offload? What can I take off my plate? So in terms, something that I do a lot of, as I mentioned before, communicating over communicating to the company, kind of making sense of what's happening and sharing some insights. That's probably something that I could offload to AI, but as it is, I use it a lot for idea generation and most of my job these days is internal writing and there is no shortage of need for that. But taking the raw notes and putting it into ChatGPT or maybe internal tools that we have and spitting out the writing and that just. It's just love to write so much. It is my chicken soup for my little soul. And. But there is limited time in this world. I'm a busy worker, I'm a working parent. And so it is helpful to have this stuff just written for you.

Speaker B: That's amazing. Do you write stuff these days?

Speaker A: Do I write stuff? Oh, what a question. I have not written as much. Uh, sometimes writing for me, I do a couple things. I will get in there with my team and workshop ideas and I will come up with things. I try to write a little every day. Just like morning pages I always talk about the first pancake gets burnt. I'm like, I would rather the first pancake be something that I just write for myself versus like a note to the CEO. God forbid. I used to. I have an MFA in creative writing. I, I was an essayist for Spell there and I have not done that in a while. Maybe if and when I retire someday I will get back to the Joan Didion esque essays that I once enjoyed writing.

Speaker B: Would you like to write a book one day?

Speaker A: I think I would like to. I think that was always, I'll be honest that I, as a child I wrote a lot of, um, I started a lot of novels. I was one of those kids who loved getting a personal computer and I was like, oh, I'm gonna. The word processor application I thought was just what. This is incredible. But, uh, I wrote a lot of little first chapters of novels, but I never really had a brain for fiction. Whatever I came up with, the stories would always feel very cliche. So to find out that there is a wing of the writing world that was just about essays and an essay is. It comes from the French, which is saa, which means to try so an essay is like trying to figure out how you feel about something or figure out the theme of something. I really gravitated toward that. These days. I, uh, kind of write essays at work. That's like, what if we tried this more motivating angle and write it out that way? So as a very long way to answer your question, I think I would like to. I think that there could be something about product writing or UX writing for motivation that who knows? I would love to see my name on the spine of a book someday. And I would put it next to Joan Didion, be like, hey, I am Didion esque. I did it.

Speaker B: First of all, I wanted to say that, like, oh, I wanted to ask if you have a backup of those chapters that you've written before.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh. Maybe in my parents basement there was. I'll tell you one. I was very addicted to the babysitters club. And so I came up with the angle. I think it's a good one. It was this group of girls. It's a total ripoff of babysitters club, but group of girls who went to New York City. And you wanted a tour of New York City. You would call up the like tourist club or whatever it's called, and they would book you, um, a tour guide, a little kid tour guide of New York. And I had the characters. I think it's interesting now at Duolingo we have our characters, Duo and Lily and Falstaff, et cetera. And it feels good because growing up I was all about writing these characters, but I don't think I got past chapter two. But it was a good idea because I was really into New York and I was really into characters and I was really into writing. Like, well, that's. That's all you need, right?

Speaker B: I think it would be a fun experiment to take your previous writer writing the first chapters, drop it into like ChatGPT and do some like world building and character development. And then like keep writing it and maybe nudge it to do it. Like, I don't think it's cliche probably, but like, tell it like, give me the less cliche version of it. What would you do?

Speaker A: Yes, please. GPT make me less cliche. Please and thank you.

Speaker B: And then it will probably go more cliche. But, uh, anyway, yeah, awesome. Um, all right. That was a very interesting interview. Do you have a resource that you would recommend? People that currently working as product writers or want to get into the field of UX writing? Most of the resources are not UX writing related but is there something that keeps you inspired these days?

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.

Speaker B: A tool, a book, a podcast, Anything that inspires you these days?

Speaker A: I think what inspires me, actually, is if you look behind me, I have a wealth of books. And I think that books are inspiring to me in an almost ironic way. My world is getting ever more tied to the computer, tied to my phone and all these tools. I find that sitting down and stepping away and reading a book, I'm really interested in how AI can help with that. While making writers still feel extremely valued, I think they have such strong value in writing prompts and honing them. So it's. It's really nice to talk to you and express this cyclone of feelings and opportunities that we have.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was fun. Um, and it really opened my mind for many things because I think what you did with Copybot is also something we've been trying to do with a few of our clients, which is creating the guideline and then making some kind of an accessible AI so more people in their organization could use that. And some writers, I'm telling you, are frightened from these concepts right now. They're like, oh, damn, I'm actually going to build the thing that is going to replace me because it's writing for me. It's actually clear as their calendar to do more stuff, more writing or more strategic writing even.

Speaker A: Yeah. Firstly, I gotta give huge props to one of the product writers on my team. Her name is Holly Munson. She was the driving force behind Copybot. She's incredible. And the other thing is that when you are creating tools based on what you know, two amazing things come with that. One, you can position yourself as a tastemaker and the one with the keeper of the intel and the taste. And the other thing is that it can lead to huge product impact. And what tech employee doesn't want that? I think that in the content design industry, we're always talking about we can impact products, we can impact user outcomes and user sentiment. Well, this is a way to do that on a grander scale.

Speaker B: Cool. Thank you so much for your time. I'll add a link to your LinkedIn so people could reach out to you or connect with you in case they're interested. And it was great. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Writers in Tech. Check out the UX Writing, um, Hub website. We have a weekly newsletter. We just relaunched our newsletter, which is fun, Many resources. We have a free UX writing course for people to just want to check it out, see what it's all about and a lot of other cool stuff. Check our website, uxwritinghub.com and that's about it. Thank you for joining Writers in Tech. Uh, and see you next time. Bye.

Speaker A: Bye.