Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jon Bosworth

UX Writing for Software Products

In product design, writers are designers. The words in an interface are part of the visual design. The language design is an important part of the user experience.

The writer is accountable for how effectively the content communicates value to the user. Always consider, qualify, and respond to all feedback (these will often lead you to better solutions), but ultimately you are held accountable for the language regardless of limitations imposed by others. Be open to insights and fight for the best words.

When you’re the writer, every suggestion in a meeting comes with a wink and a nod in your direction, “you’ll have to wordsmith it” or “it’ll need some of your magic.”

There Are No Magic Words

It doesn’t really matter if they’re talking about the copy within the product, the social posts, blogs, marketing materials, or the bio that the CEO needs you to write for her, we’re seen as wizards; able to conjure the impossible with our capacious vocabularies. But in reality there are no magic words.

A vast vocabulary benefits a good copywriter very little, since most of our writing is done at a 4th grade level to be broadly comprehensible. So when the product manager says “we can’t use the word ‘qualified,’ so you’ll have to come up with something else,” and they can’t explain the meaning they need conveyed without using the the word “qualified,” you’re going to have a problem. A good way to go here is a “5 Why’s” exercise.

Value Comes from the Function, Not Presentation

The goal of design is to make the functionality of a product easy for the user to understand and utilize. If the functionality doesn’t provide value to the user, no amount of design can fix that problem.

Adding more language does not mean the user will try harder to extract the value. In fact, it will further discourage use because they don’t see the value AND you’re trying to make them read more to boot.

These sorts of problems should surface in early testing and validation exercises. If analytics suggest there may be a comprehension problem, turn straight to user testing to validate it. Let data tell you if the problem is with the function or the presentation and then address it accordingly.

Basic UX Writing Tips

Ask the Right Questions

When someone hits me up for copy, I ask these critical questions:

What is the user trying to accomplish?
What is the problem?
What does the user need to know?
Where was the user before landing here?
What brought them here?
What are they expecting?
What can they do from here? What do we want them to do from here?
What should they expect next?
Can we communicate this without words?

Write It Twice, Then Reduce

On a first take, I’ll look at any assets provided, discuss the copy need with any stakeholders, and then do research to better understand the tonality and vocabulary that surround the subject.

I’ll write as exhaustive of an explanation or direction as I possibly can (this could become useful in knowledge base articles and marketing materials later on). Then I’ll move to something else to purge it from my mind for at least 30 minutes. When I return, I quickly cut away any extraneous words and consolidate the language the best I can.

I read it aloud and try to reduce it by another 20%. Then I share it with stakeholders and respond to feedback as warranted. When I feel it’s as good as it can be with what we currently know, I bring it into wireframes or prototypes to test with the designs.

Research Tips:

How do analogous products say it?
How does our competition say it?
How do subject matter experts talk about it?
How do real people (preferably people that match your personas) discuss the subject?

Less Is Way Way More

The words of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery are as true today as when he said it early in the 20th century: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I cannot express this enough: less is more. If the content on the page communicates itself clearly without any orientation or introduction copy, leave it alone.

What most people don’t get is that the hardest part of UX writing is reducing it to the minimum amount necessary to communicate. Your team will be like “it’s just a few words, can you get something over to me before lunch?” No. Those few words take more process than a 1000 word blog.

Be Accountable to the User

It’s everyone on the UX team’s job to be an advocate for the user. Engineers tend to code to very specific requirements and focus on managing the technology to deliver the functionality. They often don’t even see that there is a cognitive dissonance between how the functionality works and what the user expects. You must bridge that gap, but you can’t do it with words alone.

Voice these issues, be the user’s representation, tell the user story that will reveal the obstacle to the rest of the team so you can address the problem with all of your resources and not just by adding more words. Unless your product is Medium, the user isn’t there because they wanted to do some reading, so you want to minimize the reliance on words. Copy is a last resort to communicate when nothing else can. Reading is work and you want the user to do as little work as possible.

At the end of the day, always be responsive to user testing. Is the language working the way you theorized? If not, kill it. A copy writer’s job isn’t to fall in love with their own words, it’s to fall in love with the user and communicate with them effectively and succinctly.

Surprise & Delight (don’t be annoying tho)

The writer is in the best position to surprise and delight the user. Know your personas, look them up on social channels to understand their personalities and the language they use. It’s important to always consider all users when bringing personality into the product. Adding personality can give your product a comfortable, human quality that endears people. But be careful not to exclude any of your personas. When in doubt, always err on the side of utility. More fun language does not a more fun experience make.

Be direct first; be fun when it doesn’t reduce comprehension or add unnecessary friction. A little personality goes a long way. If your brand has a strong identity or anchoring theme, that is an ideal vehicle for weaving personality seamlessly into the user interface.

Use Conventions, Don’t Fall into Patterns

Some conventions help users comprehend faster and some encourage them to skip past the content they need. When writing a blog like this, the user is patterned to scannable, paragraphed content in topical blocks, so that convention helps you comprehend the content that brought you here. Conventions can help comprehension.

With UX writing, it’s easy to fall into patterns that don’t actually help the users comprehend the content, they just help the writer meet the request of the product manager or designer. Be at the table when the initial wireframes are being developed so you can participate in deciding what content should surface to the user along their journey. Try to avoid situations where wireframes (or worse: comps or prototypes) have already been established with blocks of Lorem Ipsum where the designers want you to put your copy. Copy is central to design, it shouldn’t be shoe-horned in later.

Don’t Contribute to Copy Obesity

Don’t cram into one copy block what you know is 3 different steps that need to be communicated to the user distinctly. Challenge those decisions. Think of each piece of content as an opportunity to innovate on how you communicate with the user. Be consistent with conventions that allow the user to proceed without learning new behaviors, but don’t be afraid to make your content step out if that’s what the user needs. Good copy is like healthy eating; small, nourishing portions spread throughout the journey is better than 2 giant meals.

Test Early, Test Often, Never Trust Testing

Everyone on the team will have a million reasons not to test. The fear that dumb ideas will negate good ones. The fear of biases invalidating tests. The high water mark of statistical significance. The danger of the single story and anecdotal data. Ignore all of those. Test like hell everywhere you can. Can’t get A/B testing software? Then test your copy through your social channels. Have a teeny tiny testing budget, use mechanical turks. Whatever you have to do to get data, do it, document it, and consider it a suggestion. Testers won’t have your answers, but testing will reveal the insights you need. User test results aren’t empirical evidence, they just give you a little perspective, which is often all it takes to find the right words.

TL;DR

Reading is work and you want the user to do as little work as possible. More words rarely solve a comprehension problem in a product. If analytics suggest there may be a comprehension problem, turn straight to user testing. Let data tell you if the problem is with the function or the presentation and then address it accordingly. Ask good questions, research thoroughly, and then write, re-write, circulate, revise, reduce, and place. Then re-write it again. Love the user and the problem, don’t love your own words. That’s just gross. Balance conventions and personality, be willing to make demands of visual designers, and then test, test, test and take those results with a grain of salt.

Wordsmithing Sexy UX was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wordsmithing Sexy UX

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