How to avoid “UX content by committee” with acceptance criteria

Ben Davies-Romano
5 min readFeb 2, 2023

Tell me you’re a Product-Manager-turned-Content-Designer without telling me directly, right?

Whether you’re a professional UX Writer or a Designer responsible for your own interface text, there’s little that’s more infuriating in professional life than “copy by committee”. Obviously, everyone can write, which means that all sorts of people may begin to leave all manner of suggestions and tips and requests on your copy in your Figma files.

A screenshot of an interface from Duolingo in Figma covered in unhelpful comments.
It’s me, hi, I’m the aggressive Figma commenter, it’s me.

Of course, not everyone should write, and while suggestions and feedback can be helpful, it can often turn into a game of trying to appease people who are giving feedback based on opinion rather than UX needs.

Believe me, I’ve been in situations before where I’ve received 16 comments from 12 people representing 5 different competencies where it seems the only solution is to find words that don’t currently exist in the English language.

Back in the day as a Product Manager…

I’m sure you’ve seen Jira tickets with acceptance criteria before. In case not, they’re requirements the work done needs to meet for the ticket to count as “done”, and usually set out essential functions and behaviours that need to be technically possible for the user to accomplish.

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Ben Davies-Romano

UX and Product evangelist | https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-w-davies/ Leading content design at Klarna | Founder of Tech Outcasts | ☕️ and 🏳️‍🌈