Beginning. The only writer in the team.

I joined the team in 2012 as a copywriter — when there were no UX Writers in Russia. My first focus was Tone Of Voice — the company used formal red-tape language, typical for all finance products back then. There was a fear behind it: “If we switch to a more «human» language, no one's gonna take us seriously”. So it took me some time to get the message around — “complicated” phrasing doesn’t make us sound smart or important. It just makes us hard to understand. Later we started to get feedback (on Facebook and in emails) that people liked how simple and friendly our messages are. 

Somewhere on the way — transforming the role

When I first started my role was to validate the content after Designers would deliver their part. But pretty soon I started to ask questions — why does this particular title need to be here? Why didn’t we tell this at the previous step? Why can’t we show two different messages according to the account settings?
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So I stopped being a copywriter who fills the space with some words. I became someone who thinks about the whole user journey and makes sure our user gets the right info at the right moment.

Building the team

In a few years, I was hiring and training all new editors and especially UX Writers. When I left in 2021, we had a team of 9 — working closely with Designers, Product Managers, Developers, Support Team. 
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I built a process where UX Writers would start their work at the very beginning — with building a user flow alongside Designers and Product Managers. As we worked through scenarios in Figma, UX Writer would gather all the essential info and could influence informational architecture, visual aspects, key points, and even product decisions (from UX perspective).
I also believe that the same person who helped create a feature should deal with the consequences :) So in my team, UX Writers were also creating Help pages, FAQs, pre-made answers for the Support Team — and then helping to answer the real questions people were asking.

My Input

• Hired and trained all the editors for the company
• Created descriptions for the grades: Junior, Middle, Senior
• Defined a role of UX Writer for the business processes
• Set up a process for UX Writers and Designers to work as a team 
• Created guidelines and Tone Of Voice principles
• As UX Writer was in charge of main projects like payment methods, bank cards, multi-currency wallets, then transferring Yandex.Money to YooMoney