Musings of an amateur UX writer
There is a meeting room that can seat three people at my workplace. One morning as I walked into work, I got pulled right into this room. It was already seating double the number of people than its capacity.
So I walked in, trying hard not to breathe into other people’s faces. I looked around and noticed that “all eyes were on me”. Now, there’s something I have read somewhere that flashed through my mind at the moment — memories from your past flash by in your mind when you are taking your last breath.
Well, this wasn’t the same experience, but for a split second, I try to tickle all my brain neurons to think why am I in this closed claustrophobic room. Mustering all my confidence, which I otherwise exude quite effortlessly, I softly utter, “err. Hi, is everything ok?”
A cacophony followed. And 15 minutes later, I was alone in the room, gaping point blank at the whiteboard which read -
“Design Flaws — Text must Fix”
Well, honestly, the board had a countless number of arrows in various colours to describe the new user task flows that were going to be introduced in an upcoming release. So here’s what happened. The team had tried to explain the design workflows.
While the folks have attempted to do their best, my brain neurons, cannot but make conclusions on the fact that the team had trouble explaining the design. This sadly means, it is the design, not the text copy, that needs improving. But oh well, we live in a world, where solutions must be quick, and bizarrely enough, UX writing is now increasingly being perceived as a quick fix solution.
UX writing is a means to bridge communication between digital products and users. UX texts such as error messages, prompt messages, in-line texts, warnings, confirmation messages etc, are added to the User Interface to aid the user to complete any action on the product. Depending on the context, conciseness, and correctness of these texts, a user either continues the action or gives up.
Having set this context, let us explore how to effectively use this medium of UX writing:
Keep it short
The thumb rule of UX writing is to go by the oft-quoted advice:
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
For example: “Sign In to access content” instead of “To access content on our app, you must first Sign In”
Maintain brevity
Users are most often are focused on the interface and not on the text. It is thus safe to positively presume that users scan through the text, and never actually read them verbatim.
For example: “Download Successful” instead of “You have successfully downloaded the file”.
The only word that matter to the user here is “Successful”, everything else is redundancy.
Avoid Tautology
If you address the principles of conciseness and brevity, this condition would most effectively fall in place. Nonetheless, it is in the nature of writers to play around with words. But, that is a complete No-No when it comes to UX writing.
For example: “Are you sure you want to delete content? Deleting content will delete content from your device” and this is followed by a “Delete” button. (Now, the word Delete seems like a nightmare). The sheer number of characters in this message may drive the user to uninstall the app!
The message can be rephrased to, “Tap Delete to remove downloaded files from the device”
Be an early bird
Commence work with the designers even before they think of the design. Many a time integrating UI text while designing the screen can unfold design flaws before its too late. Designers love the words “Lorem Ipsum”. Work towards making them fall out of love with these Ipsums, give them something more concrete to live for.
User testing
Every time there is a possibility that you can run a user test, never hesitate. There is nothing better than receiving first-hand feedback from your direct users. No matter how correct and exhaustive a user-persona analysis you have done, we must remember that these users in question are the highly intelligent and ever-evolving homo sapiens, and thus we are dealing with unpredictable user behaviour.
Besides these few points mentioned here, there are many more factors that influence and govern UX writing. While we can go on creating best practices and norms, what is to be kept in mind is the fact that UX writing is still a niche and ever-growing field. Rules can be made as we grow in this field. There are no hard and fast standards now, each writer uses words that best fit their context and users. The guidelines are always good to keep as a reference. While we are creating new rules, it is but imperative that we centre them around a few standards some wise people have cracked for us.
