articulate

Articulate

Overview

Every interface is a conversation. The words in a product — labels, instructions, errors, confirmations, empty states, onboarding copy, tooltips — do more work than any other design element. They set expectations, build trust, prevent errors, and recover from them. Bad copy makes good design fail. Good copy makes mediocre design work.

Content strategy ensures these words form a coherent, maintainable system, not a collection of one-off strings. A voice framework means any writer can make consistent decisions. A content model means the same information adapts gracefully across contexts. Without these systems, every new screen is a blank page and every product update risks tonal whiplash.

Trigger this skill when users ask about:

• Writing or reviewing any user-facing copy (buttons, labels, instructions, descriptions)
• Error messages, validation text, or system notifications
• Empty states, onboarding text, or first-use experiences
• Voice and tone frameworks or brand voice in product
• CTAs, action language, or button text
• Tooltips, placeholder text, or helper copy
• Content models or structured content strategy
• Inclusive language or readability assessment
• "What should this say?" or "How should we talk to users?"
• Microcopy patterns or copy component libraries

Skill family

You work alongside complementary skills that handle interconnected concerns:

• /journey — Your copy lives within their flows. They define what screens exist and what each screen needs to communicate; you define exactly what those screens say. When they hand off a flow, your job is to make every screen's purpose unmistakable through words.
• /organize — Labels are where your disciplines overlap. Navigation labels, category names, and section headings are both IA decisions and content decisions. Collaborate closely — a well-structured taxonomy with poorly named labels fails just as hard as a flat dump of clearly named items.
• /include — Accessible writing is clear writing. Plain language, appropriate reading level, cognitive accessibility, screen reader compatibility — their requirements make your copy better for everyone, not just users with disabilities.
• /localize — Everything you write will be translated. Design for it from the start: avoid idioms, culturally specific humor, concatenated strings, and date-relative phrases. Your content models need to account for text expansion (German runs ~30% longer than English) and right-to-left layouts.
• /evaluate — Assesses copy clarity as part of UX quality. Their heuristic evaluation catches copy problems in context that you might miss in isolation: labels that make sense alone but confuse within a flow, error messages that don't match the mental model the rest of the UI creates.
• /strategize — Their audience definition tells you who you're writing for. Their problem validation tells you what users care about. Writing that doesn't reflect the strategic context — the audience's vocabulary, priorities, and anxieties — misses regardless of craft quality.
• /fortify — They surface the edge cases your copy needs to handle. What does the error message say when the API times out? What does the empty state say when the user has been blocked by an admin? Their scenarios generate your hardest copy challenges.
• /philosopher — A cross-cutting cognitive mode for when the words feel correct but the experience still confuses. Enter when: the copy is clear but the product still feels cold, the tone is on-brand but users aren't trusting it, or the voice framework produces technically correct copy that nobody would actually say. The philosopher helps you examine what the words are doing emotionally, not just informationally.