The Dash: Would you live forever as an AI bot?

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You only live… forever? At least that’s the question surrounding data and posthumous chatbots. Let’s be honest, we’ve already seen how that episode of Black Mirror ends. Along with existential thoughts, this week’s Dash comes with a few new webinars, virtual events, and an important blog post on hiring multilingual writers. Cheers.

Kickstarting your UX writing career… part two. Thanks to all of your great career questions, we’ve decided to host a follow-up webinar. Catch up on part one and register for part two here! Can’t join? No worries, sign up and we’ll send you the recording after. 

How not being a native English speaker makes me a better UX writer. Companies often list “native English speaker” as a job requirement but are they missing out on first-class writing talent? We think so. Our latest blog post by Dragana Milovanovic is an important reminder why not being a native English speaker makes you perfect for user experience writing roles. And key to that is pure human empathy.

Jargon and its discontents. Good ol’ jargon. We love to hate it but sometimes we can’t write without it. Lynne Carstarphen, senior writer at Square, offers a glimpse into crafting clear, transparent financial copy and how to discern if and when jargon is appropriate.

When machine learning meets UX writing. Serena Giust, UX writer at Booking.com, shares how the UGC (User Generated Content) team helps people navigate property reviews with a dash of some machine learning magic. 

Content hierarchy in action. Without strategic content organization, users will leave your product feeling #frustrated. In this case study from Gillian Massel at Shopify, we get a behind-the-scenes look at how improving content hierarchy increased adoption of two-step authentication by 62 percent. Huge.

How to deal with bad design suggestions. Executives sending sketches. Product managers sharing competitor content. A developer taking matters into their own hands. Sound too familiar? Here’s a great primer from Nielsen Norman Group on how to gracefully respond to unsolicited design ideas.

Give ‘em everything and nothing more. How do you decide how much you should say at different points in the user journey? It’s all about providing just the right amount of information in your microcopy. Thanks to Yael Ben-David, UX writer at Fundbox, for this great reminder.

On content design (a poem). Content design love is in the air. We can feel it. So it’s only fair that we bubble up this prose from Tom Wateron, content designer at IBM. Enjoy. 

Convo Design Corner 

Would you live forever as an AI bot? The (existential) question of the hour. You may have already seen the news that Microsoft secured a patent to do just that: use personal information of a deceased person to create a digital entity that lives on. Antony Terence ponders this possibility over on Medium.

How to build a great chatbot design portfolio. Brielle Nickoloff and Hillary Black are back at it again—this time analyzing four online portfolios from a mix of current and aspiring conversation designers. How would your portfolio fare? Take a look.

Conversation design resources. Get inspired, learn from experts, level up your skill set, and land your dream job. Check out these great resources from Conversation Designer Jobs and opportunities for all experience levels—intern to senior. 

Conventional voice AI overlooks trans and nonbinary users. Researchers set out to explore representation in voice and the social implications of gendering VAIs (Voice Activated AI). As you can imagine, there’s a lot of work to be done to improve the experience for every user. More from VentureBeat.

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