99% of Designers Are Ignoring This Powerful Skill
In this solo presentation, senior product designer Samuel Fabayo argues that writing is the single most important yet overlooked skill for UX and product designers. He explains that writing clarifies thinking, serves as the backbone of UX writing and storytelling, and can be leveraged to influence stakeholders, accelerate promotions, and build a personal brand. Fabayo illustrates his points with a personal case study about designing a refund experience at Monzo, showing how a narrative helped secure stakeholder buy‑in. He then provides three concrete practices to become a better writer: (1) conscious daily writing to train the "writing muscle," (2) intentional, quality‑focused reading to internalise good patterns, and (3) sharing written work publicly to create a feedback loop, citing Austin Kleon’s advice on daily dispatches. Finally, he ties these practices to three career benefits—clearer thinking leading to original ideas, expanded design influence through content creation, and a stronger personal brand—encouraging viewers to subscribe to his newsletter for further design insights.
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Most designers pay a lot of attention to improving skills like UI design, prototyping, interaction design, and some are even learning how to code. I just want to learn coding. All of these are good skills to develop as a designer, but there's one powerful skill that is completely overlooked by 99% of designers. And without mastering this one skill, your growth is very likely to flatline after the first few years of your career. But if you embrace this skill and use it to your advantage, you will unlock some exponential growth. In your design career. The skill I'm talking about is the skill of writing. In this video, I'll tell you why writing is the most important design skill to develop right now, how to become a better writer starting today, and how to use writing as a tool to accelerate your growth. This accelerated growth usually comes with benefits like faster promotions, influence, and building a strong personal brand. And at the end of the video, I'll let you know why the third benefit, which is building your personal brand, is as important as the first two. So watch Watch till the end. If you're new here, I'm Samuel Fabayo and I'm a senior product designer at Monzo, one of UK's leading digital banks. Before that, I was a senior product designer at Deliveroo, a food and delivery company that's well known in the UK and the rest of Europe. Both of these companies are known for having a really high bar for crafting great user experiences, and if there's anything I have learned from working in this environment, it is how to use writing as a tool to sell your ideas, influence your teams, and get promoted again and again and again. So why is writing the most important skill to develop right now? Let's start with a scenario. You're at the beginning of a new project. You're staring at a blank screen. You're totally stuck. You can't seem to create anything in the blank screen in front of you. It feels like you're completely out of ideas. And like you, I have been in this scenario so many times until I started paying more attention to writing. The number one reason why writing is such an important skill is because writing is the clearest form of thinking. Back to the blank screen problem. The reason you're stuck on a blank screen is because your thinking is all muddled up, and it's easier to write those thoughts in its muddled up state than to jump straight into drawing pixels on a screen. In fact, sometimes it's easier than sketching on paper. Even though most people would argue that the visual design process starts with sketches, I personally believe it starts with writing because writing is thinking made clear and visual. So when next you're stuck on a blank screen, write down your thoughts like I did here on one of the recent designs I was working on. That way you no longer have that blank screen in front of you. You now have something to work with. You should try that. The second reason is so crucial and relevant to your role as a designer. And I'm saying this because if you've made it this far in this video, I believe you're a UX or product designer or you aspire to become one really soon. So you should be aware that UX writing, which is sometimes called content design, is one of the key components of an exceptional experience. Imagine trying to use Amazon without all the descriptions and call to actions that helps you to make a buying decision. It's going to be a total shitshow, right? Although I'm not a big fan of Amazon's approach to UX design because I think it is so content-heavy, but I can't deny the fact that it works fine. Now, where a lot of designers get it completely wrong is they think UX writing is not their job, so they just focus on making cool, beautiful UI designs and nice prototypes. But the truth is, you really can't design a good experience without good writing, and the chances of having a UX writer in your team at the early stages of your career is quite slim. Because a lot of startups might not be able to afford that. A lot of companies can't afford that, so writing has to be one of the skills that you bring to the table as a UX designer because writing is an integral part of the user experience and it's how you create an edge for yourself and stand out. And speaking about standing out, a proven way to stand out amongst other designers is to be great at storytelling. But how do you really tell a good story if you can't even write it? Steve Jobs once said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller, and that is so profound and true. The most intriguing stories make people feel something, and once you strike an emotion from someone, you'll most likely get an action from them. And guess what? You can't tell good stories if you're a bad writer because writing is the bedrock of storytelling. One of the things that makes you a great designer is your ability to sell a vision, your ability to show people how something that doesn't exist would work, and to do that, you have to tell a story. Quick story. Recently, I was working with my team on a design vision to show how we would improve the experience of helping people get their money back. when a merchant that has promised to refund them has refused to uphold that promise. Before I joined Monzo Bank, I was already a customer, so the first thing I did was to think about my own personal experience as a customer with getting refunds from merchants. And all of a sudden, I remembered there was a time when a merchant refused to refund the security deposit that I paid for a car that I rented while I was on holiday in Albania, even though I had returned the car in perfect condition. So I used this story as the narrative for the vision that I was working on, but I switched the persona to an hypothetical customer. Now, each time I presented the vision of how we would solve this problem, I always started with the story, and the key stakeholders connected to that vision every time. Now, the project is on our roadmap, and we are currently working on making that vision a reality. The truth is, a few years ago, when I didn't understand the importance of writing and storytelling, given that same project, I would have jumped into my design solutions when presenting. And the decision makers would have found it difficult to connect to the vision, and the vision would have been buried. It would just be the end of, of it all. Now that you understand why writing is the most important skill you should develop, you're probably wondering, but I suck at writing. How do I get better? First of all, you are not alone. Most times I suck too, but I'm a better writer now than I was one year ago because I have taken a couple of steps to intentionally improve my writing. And I'll tell you 3 things that I focused on in the last 12 months. The first thing I did was practicing conscious writing daily. And what do I mean by conscious writing? We write unconsciously every day. We text our friends on WhatsApp, we leave comments on Instagram posts, we write messages to our teams on Slacks and Teams. Conscious writing is picking an intentional topic to write about. An example is writing about a holiday experience after you have returned, or writing about an idea that you want to share. Another example, which is becoming my favorite, is writing my train of thought so I can think more clearly. I usually do this at the beginning of a new design challenge or when a topic is unclear to me. The prompt I use for this form of writing is usually, here is how I'm thinking about This prompt helps me dump my unrefined thoughts in its unclear state, then I start refining. And what I need you to do is to make conscious writing a daily habit, even if it is for 15 minutes. Write consciously every day. This is the only way that your writing muscle gets its workout. The second thing is to start reading a lot more. The reason it's important to read a lot is you unconsciously identify patterns in what makes a piece of writing good. You start to notice storytelling patterns, sentence structures, and use of words. But developing the habit of voracious reading can be hard, and I'm currently on that journey too, and I've found that I slip out of the habit often. So instead of committing to reading a lot of books, which has been a bit hard for me to achieve, I pay a lot of attention to anything I'm reading, and I try to understand why it is so interesting to me. For example, when I find myself in the deep end of a blog post, I take a step back to see the introduction of that blog post to understand how I was convinced to invest my time into reading it in the first place. And that has really helped me pick interesting concepts from the way other people write. That way, I focus more on the quality of reading more than the quantity of the books that I read. If you want to make it easier to read anywhere and at any time, get a Kindle like this one. It has really helped me, and that way you can even avoid doom scrolling. When you're just waking up, you could just pick up your Kindle and you could just read. The third thing I did, which I think might be the most important thing, is that I started sharing what I wrote. Simply because it's the only way to build a feedback engine. Sharing what you've written helps you understand what works and what doesn't. How do people react to what you've written? What kind of emotion does your writing convey? What kind of actions does it inspire? These are the questions that you want answered so you can improve. This book, um, by Austin Kleon is a New York Times bestseller and very popular in the creative design community. And the coolest thing about this book is the fact that the author is not even a designer, he's a writer. Everything he wrote about showing your work is from the lens of a writer, but it applies to every creative regardless of what you create or how you do it. And my favorite part of the book is where it talks about sending out a daily dispatch of your work no matter how bad you think it is. Just share something daily and you'll see how much you've improved from the feedback engine that you've built. Now to the most fun part of this video. This is the deep end, and if you've made it this far, you've done a great job. So how do you get the benefits of influence, faster promotions, and building a strong personal brand by mastering the skill of writing? It is all there, littered all over everything I spoke about on why writing is such an important skill to develop. But let me make it crystal clear. Firstly, when your thinking becomes clearer by writing regularly, you're able to unlock novel and original ideas. And by original, I mean you're not just adopting someone else's idea. You've filtered it and added your own unique perspective because you've thought about it clearly. Now you can articulate your idea better and you can solve problems in smart and unique ways. And guess what happens when you can solve problems and clearly articulate yourself? You get promoted a lot faster. See how it all starts with writing as a way of thinking clearly. Secondly, when you add writing to your design skill set, you become better positioned to thrive in the competitive design space. You're no longer the designer that can only make an interface look good. You can also write the necessary calls to action and information that makes the experience truly user-friendly. But we don't just stop there. You can also put an amazing presentation together or a proposal together using good writing or storytelling to sell your ideas and pitch yourself for that new job that you want. Lastly, and slightly controversial, building a personal brand is way easier when you've developed the habit of writing regularly. You're probably thinking, but I'm not even interested in building a personal brand. Well, the truth is, either you want it or not, you have a personal brand. Because with every subsequent interaction that you have with people, either in person or online, you leave an impression of who you are with them and they subconsciously assign a brand to you. It's like moving into an empty apartment and letting people choose your interior decoration for you based on what they know about you. No, you wouldn't want that. You want to choose your couch, your curtains, your beddings yourself. So when people visit, they have an idea of who you actually are and what you like. And I might have gone on a bit of a tangent there, but you get my point. Now, the question is, do you want to be more intentional about the impression that you leave? And I think you do. And a big part of building your personal brand is being honest about who you are, what you stand for, the impact you want to have, and sharing that in a way that suits you best. And writing regularly and sharing what you write online is the best way to do that. If you've gotten any value from this video, then you get more value by subscribing to my newsletter where I share design tips, real case studies, and portfolio inspiration to 1,000+ designers like you. It's linked down there in the description. You need 3 skills to get ahead of 90% of designers starting today, and you should watch this video next to know what those skills are, and I'll see you there.
