Episode 24 of The Informed Life podcast features an interview with Michael J. Metts. Alongside co-author Andy Welfle, Michael has written a new book, called Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience, and in this show we discussed their thesis:

if you think about any sort of experience that you interact with, like a mobile app, that’s the one we use as an example right in the beginning of the book. Your mobile app, if you open it up and you start tapping through it, you start looking at it, you start to see words everywhere. You’re interacting with language just as much as you’re interacting with visual elements like menu items and buttons and all those other things.

So, our thesis really is just that you should treat those words as part of the design and that you should apply design techniques and practices to those words and how you get there, and not treat them as something that’s inconsequential or after the fact. So, we’ve done that in our own careers, and we’ve seen how vital it is to building a good experience, and we just want to share that with others.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know why I wanted to have Michael on the show. We discussed the relationship between writing and design, how to manage language, and what everybody — designer or not — can do to be a better writer. Hope you enjoy our conversation.

The Informed Life Episode 24: Michael J. Metts on Writing as Design