UX Writing

Why it exists

Interface copy is the part of a design most people can improve and fewest people own. It arrives late, it is written by whoever is nearest, and it is inconsistent in ways that make a product feel broken: three words for the same action, buttons that say OK, errors that blame the user and offer no way out.

Rather than review copy screen by screen, I built the rules into a skill. A designer shares a screen, a mockup or even a description, and gets back an audit with rewrites and reasons, in the product's voice, before the copy reaches a review.

How it works

The skill follows a fixed analysis framework. It identifies the context first: who the user is, where they are in the journey, what state they are in, and which platform they are on. It then catalogues every text element on the screen, from titles and buttons to placeholders, help text and status lines, and audits each one for clarity, conciseness, usefulness, consistency, tone and accessibility. It considers how the screen will be scanned and whether the most important words are front-loaded.

For every element that needs work, the output is the same shape: the element, the current text, the suggested text, and the principle behind the change. It closes with an overall assessment: the two or three biggest wins, whether the tone fits the moment, consistency issues, copy that is missing altogether such as empty and error states, and anything too long for a phone.

The principles it enforces

• Clarity above all. People scan; every word must be understood on first read. Plain words, present tense, direct questions.
• Brevity as respect for the user's time. Remove the most you can before the sentence collapses. The first two words of a line are the most read.
• Action over description. Buttons describe the action and set the expectation for what happens next. Errors say what happened and how to recover. Empty states carry a call to action.
• Consistency builds trust. One word per concept, everywhere. Button labels match the page they lead to. Sentence case unless the product says otherwise.
• Tone adapts to the moment. Empathetic in errors, plain and unsoftened for destructive actions, neutral for routine tasks.
• A short list of words it will always flag: invalid, error occurred, please, successfully, click here, oops, and absolutes like never.

What changed

Copy reviews got shorter because the mechanical problems are caught before a human looks. Designers who did not think of themselves as writers now ship copy that reads like it came from one voice. And because the rules live in the skill rather than in a document nobody opens, the standard holds on the weeks when nobody is checking.

Get the skill

The skill is open source under the MIT licence at github.com/akashsoti/claude-skills. It is plain Markdown: a SKILL.md with the instructions and a references folder it reads as it works. Copy the ux-writing folder into your skills directory and it is ready to use in Claude Code or a Claude project.