Design thinking meets editing

Before I turned to editing, I was a UX (User Experience) designer for many years; designing and building interactive voice systems such as Alexa on Echo devices and Siri on iPhone. My technical background, combined with my fascination with linguistics led me to Voice UX—where language and technology converge. The job required understanding speech recognition and language technology deeply, so users are free from having to understand it at all. In essence, it meant hiding the complexity beneath the user experience that was intuitive and delightful.

From outside, UX design and editing may appear completely unrelated. Yet my UX design skills, especially with voice assistants, have been instrumental in shaping my editing philosophy. As I explored the world of book writing and editing in recent years, I realized the user-focused design principles I practiced are directly applicable to substantive editing. The most fundamental of them is upholding user experience.

There are many types of designers, depending on the type of product and the life cycle stage of product development. But regardless of design discipline, a designer is always asking: Is this the best experience for the user? To stay focused on this question, user empathy is an essential strength for a UX designer—the ability to put yourself in the user's shoes and a keen sense of understanding their needs. For a book, that user is the reader.

One of the biggest challenges while writing a book is often exactly that: staying focused on the reader's experience, especially for first-time authors. By the time a book manuscript is complete, the author is too familiar with the content. Draft after draft, they have written and rewritten, reframed, and restructured the ideas and arguments. The effect? What Steven Pinker explains in his book, The Sense of Style, as the “curse of knowledge”: the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know. Because once you know something, you forget what it was like not to know it and the journey of learning it. Complex ideas that authors have built over the course of their careers can be even harder to present without overwhelming the reader. 

And this is where a good substantive editor adds value: staying aligned with the reader experience. Great editing, like great UX design, requires stepping outside the creator's perspective and into the experience of the person for whom the work is being created: the reader. This is why every editor must start by understanding who the target readers are, what they know, why they are reading the book, and what gap in their knowledge or experience the author is hoping to fill. The ability to grasp the content with the reader's perspective, even through revisions, is the most essential asset for an editor.

The sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters are the readers’ interface to the author’s message. Just like product design, my focus is on making that interface clear, consistent, and convincing, making the book reading journey delightful. I stay aligned with readers’ goals, even as I am reading the manuscript for the second or third time and reviewing author updates. This enables me to provide concrete and actionable feedback to the author.

Steve Jobs famously said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Looking back and connecting the dots, years of experience in Voice UX design have shaped how I help authors connect their ideas with readers.