Choose the right words, because content is ‘king’
Imagine you’ve joined a social media app and the first screen that you see is this:
A pretty bad and demotivation start to a new friendship , right?
Or trying to log into an account and this ambiguous message pops up.
What’s wrong? Username? password? Who knows.
Good design. Bad content. What’s the point?
In the UX world, we hear a lot words like user research, coding, information architecture, mental model, visual design but rarely do we talk about content. The meat of the matter. We’ve collectively come to a conclusion that content is someone else’s headache. The client will provide it or the user will generate it. But the reality is that content strategy is an integral part of UX :
A good user experience is not successful until and unless you can help users achieve their goals with language. This builds trust and loyalty.
So, the question is, what do content strategy do?
In Rachel Lovinger words:
The main goal of content strategy is to use words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.
But can content strategy work alone? The answer is no. It’s a part of the bigger team which include the designers and the researchers. Writers work with designers to think about the design hierarchy on the page and to guide user action. Writers work with researchers to test hypothesis about language and gain user insights with their great research capabilities. This leads to a holistic approach and better experience. An example of such an approach is seen on Google ‘hotel search’ page.
Just changing of two word had a significant impact on the business. ‘Book a room’ was a committal statement in the decision making process. But changing it to ‘check availability’ resulted in 17% increase in user engagement on that page, as it was meeting user mindset.
Now that we got a hang of what content does to a product, how do we go about infusing it with meaning?
Allison Rung (UX Writer, Google), speaks about three principles of content writing in her speech at Google I/O ’17.
Clear. Concise.Useful
Clear words lead to clarity. Remove technical terms and put the actions in the context of the users. This is a good lesson to remember when you’re thinking of product announcements or app updates.
Concise doesn’t just mean short. It also means economical. And from research, we know users follow a F shape pattern while scanning a page, which means we should put the important information at the very beginning. In the above example the two important words are at the end of the sentence.
Useful is when you can guide the user to reach where they want to go. Right now the CTA (call to action button) is not leading the user to their desired destination. Change the ‘ok’ to ‘try again’ but what if you don’t remember your password at all. The user need another CTA button ‘recover password’.
Using these basic principles can help you connect better with your users. Paying attention to writing and the people you’re writing for can uncover some of the basic functions your app needs to offer. But good UX writing is not science. It doesn’t have any correct answer. It depends on your user in that context and also your brand voice.
Your brand voice will guide your to create a balance between the above mentioned principles in a way that’s true to your product’s character.
As UX designers, we want to build products that feels natural and conversational rather than cold and transactional, right? Make time in your projects to deeply consider the content requirements. Learn it. Practice it. promote it. It’s high time we make content matter.
