This chapter provides a comprehensive account of UX writing as a contemporary domain of elite language work. I first discuss existing literature on UX writing, showing that while scholars have discussed at large how users interact with digital media, there is considerably less work on how language is used by producers. After this brief survey, I offer an in-depth introduction to UX writing in three parts. First, I provide a broad mapping of the profession, where I discuss the history and origins of UX writing. Next, I give an introduction to UX writers’ language work, illustrating how their work is both centrally concerned with writing interface texts and much more complex than that. Finally, I turn to some initial ethnographic observations about UX writers’ concrete text production. In this last regard, I am particularly interested in how UX writers mobilize (meta)linguistic knowledge in their work, arguing that they are not just language workers but also language experts. Overall, the chapter thus offers a first description of the work and profession of UX writers, orienting primarily to these wordsmiths’ own views and understandings of what it is that they do.

This chapter investigates the normative impact of UX writers’ language work by discussing how they craft particular audiences through their work. As such, this chapter turns to the textual products that UX writers create. My analysis focuses on a particularly impactful example of this work, the texts produced for cookie consent notices. Examining the kinds of audiences and addressees that surface in and through these texts, I suggest, can help scholars consider how digital media entail not just traditional notions of audience design but also a more explicit and active crafting of audiences, whereby some people are constructed as audiences and others not. Specifically, I discuss how automated participant roles, the stylization of users, as well as the design of imposed interaction lead to an encoding of both specific participant roles as well as particular social identities in software interfaces. Ultimately, I suggest that this may be understood as a form of symbolic violence, whereby the software interface is used as a means to impose not just an interaction order but also a particular social order onto users.

This chapter addresses the interplay of invisibility, status, and power in UX writing. My aim in the chapter is twofold. First, I am interested in how UX writers understand and negotiate the (in)visibility of language in their own work. Tracing the semiotic ideologies of these professional language workers, I discuss how UX writers operationalize a discursive ideal of invisible writing in order to establish the value of their linguistic work vis-à-vis their colleagues, who typically privilege other modes of meaning making. Second, I examine how UX writers make sense of the linguistic and cultural-political consequences of this invisibility. In this regard, I suggest that the ideal of an invisible interface is a central media ideology that not only structures the work of UX writers but ultimately determines how ordinary users can(not) communicate with and through digital media. I conclude by linking my case study to broader discussions of invisibility in cultural studies of technology, arguing that communication with and through digital media is shaped not only by users’ perspectives but also by the semiotic and media ideologies of its producers.

This chapter brings in the human-centered data analytics perspective to cybersecurity.