Someone recently told me they were in a UX writing interview and were asked, "how do you determine which metrics you use to measure the success of your copy", and they couldn't answer. So I'm going to try and repeat what I told them. THREAD.

There is no one magic metric that you will use to determine whether your copy is successful or not. Unfortunately many UX writers and content designers tend to fixate on A/B or optimization testing to decide whether copy is effective. That's a bad strategy.

Instead, the metrics you use to determine whether your copy is successful or not will be entirely dependent on:

- The project
- The goals
- What you have identified as success
- What you want to see happen

This also means need to take an active interest and form a relationship with other departments and areas within your organization to determine if you have actually achieved success. What you think of as success can actually be failure.

Let's say a UX writer is tasked with a way to speed up an on-boarding process. The success metric is identified as successful onboards / time to onboard. They do so by removing some instructional copy and find that users are onboarded quicker than ever. Success, right?

Except that three months from now the support center is swamped with calls from people who are confused about how to actually use the app - and they wouldn't have been confused if the original copy was kept intact. You've actually increased overall costs.

Not to mention impacted your brand negatively. But for many organizations, there are so many variables involved that no one might ever blame *you* for the issue. They might just see it as an isolated incident. But you need to be better than that.

In this instance, part of your metrics measurement would be monitoring support to identify and track how many people call about this particular issue. You might need to wait two or three months to see if you've actually had a positive impact.

Even then, you wouldn't write your case study as saying as that you DEFINITELY had an impact. What you would say is that the project had set a goal of reduced support calls as a metric. Three months after implementing the text, you observed no increase in support calls.

Not as sexy as an A/B test that shows how your button caused a 150% uplift in engagement. But a more robust, comprehensive view that incorporates a complete strategy.