How to use Writer in product & design
Who can use this feature
- Supported on Team and Enterprise plans
What's in this article:
- What is Writer and why should I care?
- How do I get started using Writer?
- The top 5 ways product and design teams use Writer
- The 7 steps of a Writer power user
What is Writer and why should I care?
Writer is a generative AI writing tool which helps all of the teams at your company write with the same style. Writer helps you create any kind of written content — all while staying true to your company’s voice and brand. You may have heard of other generative AI tools, but here’s what makes Writer special for you:
- We integrate directly with Figma, making it easy to get real-time suggestions right where you're working.
- We’re already trained on your company’s brand, voice, and style guide. No more searching Slack to remember how you capitalize part of your product.
- We’re safe to use at work. We’re built for businesses, with all the security and privacy features that entails. We’re IT team approved!
- We keep humans in the driver’s seat when it matters. High-impact, creative work needs you — we’re just here to help you polish, edit, fact check, and scale your best work.
How do I get started using Writer?
Install the Figma app and other extensions
Writer plugs into the tools you’re already using to offer suggestions and corrections in real time. You’ll get instant help with:
- Grammar, spelling, and clarity
- adherence to your company’s style guide
- shortcuts for approved content you reuse over and over again
Learn more about Writer apps
here
.
Rewrite your content — wherever you're working
Working on a draft that isn't quite right? Highlight text in a Writer doc or app or extension and select the rewrite ✨ icon to rephrase it. You can rephrase, polish, simplify, shorten, or enrich whatever you just wrote, or modify the tone of your writing. Product and design teams often use rewrite to keep their writing simple and short, and to remove awkward phrasing if English isn't their first language.
Learn more about rewriting content
here
.
Use apps to generate great first drafts
Have you ever thought it'd be easier to write if you had a first draft, instead of a blank page? Our out-of-the-box apps make it easy to generate all kinds of writing, from email subject lines to fresh error messages.
From the Writer dashboard, select
All apps to explore all the available apps.
Already working out of a draft document? Select the
Explore apps button to open the library.
We’ll explore a few of our favorite apps below in greater detail, but we recommend exploring the
Product,
External Comms, and
General sections of the apps library.
Check out the Learning Center to grow your expertise
Generative AI is powerful — but it might feel intimidating at first. If you ever have a question, encounter a problem, want new ideas, or just want to grow your own AI expertise, select the Learning Center lightbulb 💡 icon for access to webinars, guides, and our Support team.
The top 5 ways product and design teams use Writer
Use our Figma app to save time on content design
Writer allows your content designers to build a robust style guide including:
- a list of terms based on your approved product taxonomy
- pre-approved, reusable content components
- guidelines for inclusive language
Writer keeps track of the spelling, formatting, and usage of each of your products and features so you don't have to. We go beyond simple spelling and grammar checks to evaluate whether your writing is clear, consistent, inclusive, and aligned with the rest of your company. With the Figma app, you'll spend less time reviewing your work with content designers and more time designing.
Transform user research calls into action items
Spend less time writing up research call notes and more time putting what you've learned to use.
Our recaps app makes it easy to generate helpful takeaways from your research calls in seconds:
After uploading the recording of your research call and selecting
Generate recaps, Writer will spit out the following: Key speakers, User’s primary use cases, User’s pain points and challenges, What’s going well, Usability feedback, Feature requests, Bugs reported, Reactions to upcoming features
Use snippets to create banks of error messages, tooltips, guidelines, and more
Do you find yourself copy-pasting the same error messages, or hunting down the right URL over and over again? Snippets are reusable pieces of text that you can create in Writer and insert wherever you're writing. Product teams and designers use snippets to create libraries of:
- standard error messages
- commonly used tooltips
- instructions and internal guidelines
Simply right click the frame from the left menu, select
Plugins > Writer for Figma to open the plugin. Scroll down to the
Snippets section and enter a keyword in the search bar. If you're inserting the text into your work, click the snippet to copy it to your clipboard.
Transform technical documentation in seconds
Our generative AI apps and open-ended Ask Writer apps make it easy to turn complex documentation into resources for the rest of your team:
- Our release notes app transforms ticket titles into neatly organized, shareable summaries
- Summarize lengthy research notes for takeaways, or summarize technical documentation to highlight key features and capabilities
- Create enablement resources for different audiences with our FAQ generator app. Paste any notes and documentation you have, then generate FAQs for sales teams, customers, and more.
Generate clear, concise UI copy
- Help your customers help themselves by creating actionable error messages.
- Tooltip taking up too much real estate? Use our tooltip shortener app to keep things concise.
- Use our open-ended Ask Writer app to generate more specific content:
- Generate UI copy for a Teams settings page encouraging user to invite colleagues. List at least 3 possible answers.
- Generate a short email template for users who have been invited to join their company's Brickly account. Include a CTA convincing them to log in to their account.
- Generate 10 names for a feature which shares a real estate listing on social media.
These five use cases are only the beginning!
The 7 steps of a Writer power user
1) Pick the right out-of-the-box app or craft an open-ended prompt
The first step to using generative AI in Writer is to decide whether you want to use a prebuilt app or write a prompt from scratch using our
Ask Writer app.
- A prebuilt app is a great choice when you’re generating highly structured content (like a press release, or a social media post). It's also a great place to start if you're new to generating content with AI - no experience necessary!
- Using Ask Writer to compose a prompt from scratch is a good choice if you need to apply specific parameters, or reference a specific source (it can reference a URL, text, or an uploaded file).
Crafting a good prompt for
Ask Writer requires a bit more thinking to get the right results, right away. A good rule of thumb is to answer the five most important questions:
- Who - Who is the creator? Who is the audience?
- What - What form should the output take? How long should it be? What tone should it use? Is there a specific call to action or bit of content which Writer should use?
- Where - Where will your audience consume this content, i.e. TikTok, Facebook, a blog, etc?
- Why - Why does the audience need this content? What are you aiming to achieve with it?
- How - How should we structure the content? What should we reference to create the right content?
We’ve put together an in-depth
Prompt Crafting Guide to help you get high-value results from open-ended prompts.
2) Generate new outputs if needed
If you don’t love the content generated by your prompt, try again! Click Generate Content again to create a new draft based on your prompt:
3) Want more? Keep writing!
Like what you’re seeing, but you just want a bit … more? Click the ⚡ lightning bolt icon in the top right corner to generate more content based on your prompt:
4) Use claim detection to check your work
AI tools which are based on large language models (like Writer) are trained to recognize linguistic patterns, and to use those patterns to produce new content. However, they're not trained to verify facts. Writer generates content that sounds right — but it has no way of knowing whether that statement is true! A human editor should always verify any facts or statistics before they select “Publish”. Clicking the 🛡️ shield icon in the top right corner will highlight sentences which might need to be verified:
5) Review suggestions to stay on-brand
Once Writer has generated content that you’re happy with, it’s time to do a little copy-editing. Our suggestions don’t just check your spelling and grammar — they’ll keep you in line with your company’s brand and voice.
Suggestions will automatically appear on the right side of any Writer draft:
If you’re using a Writer extension, select the suggestions score to open the sidebar:
6) Generate highlights to share on social media
Any time you create a draft longer than 250 words, Writer can generate highlights for you. Click the 📣 highlights icon to spin up a meta description, summary, and social media posts:
7) Add magic links to improve SEO and keep users on your site
As a content marketer, you know using internal links is a great way to boost your company’s SEO rankings. But identifying possible internal links in a piece of longform content is really tedious!
Click the 🔗 magic links icon in the top right corner of your Writer draft. You can highlight a keyword phrase or enter a keyword and Writer will suggest the most relevant links from your most important websites:
If you’ve followed the 7 steps above, congratulations — you’re a Writer power user! 🏆 By taking advantage of the most important features in Writer, you’ll be able to get the maximum impact out of your best writing, while spending less time on busywork.