The work of a UX writer is something you come across everyday. Whether you’re hailing an Uber or browsing Spotify for that one Drake song, your overall user experience is affected by the words you read at each touchpoint.

A UX writer facilitates a smooth interaction between user and product at each of these touch points through carefully chosen words.

Some of the most common touchpoints UX writers work on are interface copy, emails and notifications. It doesn’t sound like the most thrilling stuff, but imagine using your favorite apps without all the thoughtful confirmation messages we take for granted. Take Eat24’s food delivery app, instead of a boring loading visual, users get a witty message like “smoking salmon” or “slurping noodles.”

Eat24’s app has UX writing that works because it’s engaging.

Xfinity’s mobile app provides a pleasant user experience by being intuitive. Shows that are available on your phone are clearly labeled under “Available Out of Home.” I’m bummed that Law & Order: SVU isn’t available, but thanks to thoughtful UX writing at least I knew that sad fact ahead of time.

Regardless of where you find a UX writer’s work, there are three traits an effective UX writer must have. Excellent communication skills is a must. The ability to empathize with the user is on almost every job post.

But from my own experience working with UX teams, I’d argue for the ability to advocate as the most important skill.

UX writers may have a very specialized mission, but they typically work within a greater UX design team. In larger companies some UX writers even work with a smaller team of fellow writers. Decisions aren’t made in isolation. You can be the wittiest writer, with a design decision based on obsessive user research, but if you can’t advocate for those decisions then what’s the point?

I mentioned several soft skills, but that doesn’t mean aspiring UX writers can’t benefit from developing a few specific tech skills. While the field doesn’t require a background in web development, UX writers often collaborate with engineering teams. Learning some basic web development principles such as responsive design can help writers create a better user experience across all devices. In a world of rapid prototyping, I’d also suggest learning a few prototyping apps. Several are free to try and super intuitive.

Now that the UX in front of writer no longer intimidates you, go check out ADJ, The American Genius’ Facebook Group for Austin digital job seekers and employers. User-centric design isn’t going anywhere and with everyone getting into the automation game, you can expect even more opportunities in UX writing.

What if we told you Australian officials believe they have found a way to reduce driving deaths by almost 30% in just two years? It’s a pretty appealing concept. After all, Australia alone faces an average of over 3 deaths a day due to driving accidents. And Australia’s average death rate clocks in at just half of what we face in the United States.

There’s just one problem with Australia’s proposed solution: it’s basically Big Brother.

Basically, Australia plans to use AI cameras to catch people texting and driving. There are plenty of places that have outlawed texting and driving, but that rule is very hard to enforce – it basically means catching someone in the act. With AI cameras, hands free driving can be monitored and fined.

Australia has already started rolling out some of these systems in South Wales. Because this is a new initiative, first time offenses will be let off with a warning. The following offenses can add up quickly, though, with fines anywhere from $233 to $309 USD. After a six month trial period, this program is projected to expand significantly.

But there are real concerns with this project.

Surprisingly, privacy isn’t one of these worries. Sure, “AI cameras built to monitor individuals” sounds like a plot point from 1984, but it’s not quite as dire as it seems. First, many places already have traffic cameras in order to catch things like people running red lights. More importantly, though, is the fact these machines aren’t being trained to identify faces. Instead, the machine learning for the cameras will focus on aspects of distracted driving, like hands off the wheel.

The bigger concern is what will come from placing the burden of proof on drivers. Because machine learning isn’t perfect, it will be paired with humans who will review the tagged photographs in order to eliminate false positives. The problem is, humans aren’t perfect either. There’s bound to be false positives to fall through the cracks.

Some worry that the imperfect system will slow down the judicial system as more people go to court over traffic violations they believe are unfair. Others are concerned that some indicators for texting while driving (such as hands off the wheel) might not simply apply texting. What if, for instance, someone was passing a phone to the back seat? Changing the music? There are subtleties that might not be able to be captured in a photograph or identified by an AI.

No matter what you think of the system, however, only time can tell if the project will be effective.

If you have had any nightmares about the singularity, aka robot apocalypse, let me put those fears to bed. In actuality the doomsday scenario will be much more clumsy and stupid looking than you ever thought robots could be.

As a Web Producer, I am entrenched in research – and today, I came across a site I hadn’t seen before – techzimo.com. After reading the first 2 sentences of an article about Uber, I began to think something felt a bit off about the writing.

Quotation marks were pressed right against the words before it, like”this”. Now the article didn’t include that many quotes, but what it did inhabit was a tangential synonym that didn’t quite contain.

If you felt your mind pause for a second while reading that last sentence, you’re not alone. You’ll notice some of the words almost work together, but not quite, and those kinds of mishmoshed sentences and punctuation faux pas are exactly what I was dealing with when reading the article.

Technically the quotes were around the right words, but the placement of the quotation marks in the rest of the sentence was all kinds of wrong. Also, some of the words used do technically equate to the concept the “writer” was looking to achieve, but given my experience, a real live human would use different words that are easier to understand…right?

After powering my way through the badly worded, weird misquoted article, I looked at who the author was. “Team TechZimo” wrote the piece, I immediately thought “Oh, well if there is a story no one wants to cover, maybe they throw a bot on the story and just let it go?”

Then I looked at how many articles “Team TechZimo” had written – 720 posts, but that’s not all, while writing to this point that number has reached 727. in the hour since I first looked at the site, 7 more articles were written, I thought “that has to be a bot.”

But that cant be…that’s an insane number of articles for a company to hand to a bot. So I looked at the home page to view all the articles, and I’ll bet you can guess what I found.

All were written by “Team TechZimo.”

That’s right. Every single article on this site was bot written.

My next question was “how long this had been going on?” So I investigated. The very first article was written on January 31st, 2020, and 39 articles were written the day they opened the site!

To recap and to further drive home my point, this entire site did not exist 1 month ago but now has 729 articles up. Every one of those articles are filled with errors, but maybe not egregious enough issues to ring an average reader’s alarm bells.

So naturally the next thing I wondered was why? Why create a site that improperly writes news stories that people may want to read? My first guess is ad space, every page has ads. A single person can get a writing bot for free (I will not link one!), pay for a domain, get that bot a writin, and profit from generic ads.

I realize that by writing this and linking to the TechZimo site, I am almost contributing to the validity of this issue, but honestly I am more worried about the people who do not scrutinize their news sources.

Lucky for you (and other fact-driven readers), it seems many of the articles are mostly filled with plain facts. The only problem was with punctuation and word choice.

So while you are out inquiring the internet, be sure to”keep your eye to the grindstone,” and beware of this or any other one-authored sites that within 1 month, has 730 articles and zero comments.