Need a Unicorn? How About a Good Writer?

Everyone does.

At least that’s the word from user experience (UX) design guru, John Madea, who operates in the space where design, technology, and business meet.

In his March “2017 Design in Tech Report,” Medea posited that writing is the new “unicorn skill”—citing the need for designers to include more than placeholder text in their prototypes. As Katharine Schwab explains it in “Forget Coding: Writing Is Design’s ‘Unicorn Skill,’”

“Users still depend on copy to interact with apps and other products. If designers don’t know how to write well, the final product—be it a physical or digital one—can suffer as a result.”

Perhaps the importance of clear, clean copy will permeate the borders of other departments as well as product development. (Who knows what happy outcomes might result from the marriage between a dedicated copywriter and the corporate handbook?)

We’ll keep our fingers crossed that this unicorn skill of effective writing will prove more attainable than its fanciful namesake.