Ryan: Welcome to 10-Minute Tech Comm. This is Ryan Weber at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and it’s my pleasure to welcome today’s guest.
Irina: My name is Irina Silyanova. I’m a UX writer, a conversation designer, a localization manager with five years of experience, predominantly in fintech, B2B, and software as a service companies, and currently I’m working on an investment ecosystem for users in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
Ryan: I invited Irina on the podcast because I really enjoyed her recent article in Smashing Magazine, “How to Improve Your Microcopy, UX Writing Tips for Non-UX Writers,” and I wanted to invite her on the podcast to share some of her advice. She helps us understand how to improve microcopy, which is the short text that describes how to interact with the UI on a website, software, or app. And she explains how we want to lean into the user’s intuitive understanding of interfaces, and even how we want to apply something she calls the Channing Tatum principle. I hope you enjoy the interview.
START INTERVIEW
Ryan: Welcome to the podcast. We’re so happy to have you here. I was really excited about your article in Smashing Magazine, How to Improve Your Microcopy: UX Writing Tips for Non-UX Writers, and I just wanted to start by asking you to explain a little bit about what microcopy is and why it matters for user experience.
Irina: So, put simply, microcopy are small bits of text you can see in interfaces like in mobile apps or in websites. These are titles, button labels, error messages, tooltips, you name it. So basically every short text a user can see when interacting with a product. And why microcopy matters? In short, it guides users through an interface and helps them to interact with a product or service. It makes their experience at least seamless and ideally enjoyable.
If we break it down, microcopy helps users understand why they need to take a particular action, like clicking a button or filling out a field with their data. It explains what exactly and how needed to be done, and thus it reduces errors and overall friction. And it helps us make user interface responsive. We want it to be responsive. A user needs to know whether their action was successful or not and what the outcomes are.
Ryan: Great. Thank you very much. This is very helpful. And in your article, you give us a lot of principles and guidelines to help kind of understand how to write better UX microcopy. And we can’t go through all of them, but I did want to emphasize a few. So you gave us the rule that one microcopy item equals one idea. So kind of help me understand how I would follow this particular rule.
Irina: I guess I have to explain myself a bit here. When I say one idea, I don’t mean like one word or just one phrase. It’s not that literal. I’m not saying to, well, split up, say, password requirements into individual hints like, “great, you’ve entered some numbers,” then “please add a capital letter” and so on. No.
What I mean here is that we want to provide our users only with the information that they need at this particular stage, at this very step, that will help them take a specific action or make a decision. So the bottom line, we don’t want to add cognitive load or friction or confusion. We want to ensure that our experience is smooth and simple.
Say you’re a fintech service, a brokerage, and to use all the functions of your product, a user has to verify their identity. But if they haven’t done that and try to deposit some money, they can come across, say, a banner that says you have reached your monthly limit of $1,000 per month. You verify your identity, you can deposit up to $5,000 per month.
As a user, do I really need all this information right now? I’m stuck with a problem here. I don’t need all this information. I need just a solution, so please give me this. So instead of providing all the information we have, we can just say something, hey, you’ve reached your monthly limit and you can learn how to deposit more. So we can just guide a user to some place where they can find an appropriate option for them.
And actually, there is a term for this approach. It’s known as progressive disclosure. It effectively means that we reveal information gradually to our user. We don’t want to overwhelm them. We don’t want to give all the information we have at once. And it helps to prevent this information overload that I have already mentioned. It simplifies the interface and makes the overall experience more intuitive.
So how do you follow this one-item, one-idea rule? You just ask yourself, what does the user need most at this particular stage to take the next step? Maybe you need to warn them of something, or you need just to nudge them toward an action, or you can offer them some alternative scenario. That all counts. I have a bit of a technique. It’s kind of foolish. I call this the Channing Tatum method for better UI quality.
Ryan: Oh, I love this. Okay, to explain.
Irina: Yeah. Okay. It has nothing to do with the actual Channing Tatum, of course. But there is a scene in the movie The Lost City where his character is in a fistfight and there is Sandra Bullock’s character and she tries to hand them a gun. But when trying to attract his attention, she’s being too wordy and he doesn’t understand that.
And afterwards, he says, “You should have just said, ‘Hey. Catch. Gun.’”
LOST CITY CLIP
Sandra Bullock: Maybe next time I toss a gun at you, you can catch it instead of ducking.
Channing Tatum: How about the next time you toss a gun and you say, “Hey, Alan, catch.” And then, you know, maybe do that before you throw it.
Sandra Bullock: Well, “here” is a synonym for “catch.”
Channing Tatum: No, “here” is not a synonym for “catch.”
Sandra Bullock: Okay. In a colloquial kind of way. Yes, it is. You say “Here, I toss you a sweatshirt.” You say “Here, I toss you a pen.”
Channing Tatum: How about just “Hey! Catch! Gun!”
END CLIP
Irina: So when writing microcopy, you just think about this equivalent of, “Hey! Catch! Gun!” What this gun would be for your user.
Ryan: Excellent. I love advice from Channing Tatum on UX microcopy. This is terrific. Okay. So you also talk about, speaking of users, you know, making copy role-playable for the users. So what does that mean?
Irina: Yeah. Role-playable here is more of a mnemonic technique. It sticks. We’re talking about it right now. So apparently it grabbed your attention. So it works. The core idea, like our starting point here is that an interface is a dialogue. It’s communication. It’s the way for a user, a human, to communicate with a computer program. Of course, interface helps you to communicate with the program or perform the action. Interface is a dialogue. It’s a way for a user, a human, to communicate with some machine, like a computer, a code.
And I bet you’ve noticed it for yourself that we often talk to machines, like, I don’t know, cars, home appliances, everything. Maybe you have said, like, “Come on, not now!” when your car engine just wouldn’t start. And we rather communicate than operate things.
And this concept is particularly clear when we’re talking about chatbots or voice assistants. They are interfaces too, even though they rely on voice and has nothing to do with graphic. And this principle further develops and we can see how it works and you can also see this principle shaping the tone of voice of different brands. If you look up their brand tone of voice guidelines, you will most certainly see some words like, we want to sound relaxed, casual, or like we’re talking to a friend. And when I say that UI copy should be role-playable, I mean this principle that interface is a dialogue at its core.
But also I’m talking about the syntax of UI elements. So we have pretty established rules, such as using verbs for button labels and so on. And also we have this distinction between the elements that can be changed and can’t be changed. So titles, body text, tooltips, and all other elements that remain unchanged, these are your phrases. Or if we put it that way, our phrases as a product. And button labels, input fields, toggles, menu items, so everything that the user can interact with, fill out, click, select, and so on, these are the user’s phrases.
If we develop this analogy with the dialogue in a real-life situation of communication, we have some discourse management tools, we have non-verbal signals, so our partner in dialogue always knows when to cut in, when to ask, when to take some action. And we can’t do the same thing in the interfaces because we don’t have these non-verbal things and so on. So all we have here is our UI elements and our microcopy. So we combined them so that we could make up some kind of a dialogue with our user.
Actually, I guess you can role play your interface copy, no problem. You can assign someone as your product and someone as your user. Take, say, a design of some screen with input fields and everything, and just ask a person who is your product to read this label for the input field and the person who plays your user to read what they would type into this input field. So name, “Ryan.” Second name, “Weber.” And so on. And if your brand voice allows you to be more conversational, you can come up with different variations of your labels, like field labels.
Ryan: So you’re saying, think of the user’s interaction with the product as a dialogue, right? That these boxes and this microcopy is prompting along, and you can actually have somebody be the voice of the product and see how the conversation goes between the product and the user.
Irina: Yeah, of course. Why not? I guess it can be a very useful change of scenery, I guess, because when you are a UX writer or a UX designer, well, someone who works with this written word, so to say, your eye kind of goes numb, I guess. And if you are, well, actually, this is a common writing technique. If you can’t write something or if you’re not sure about what you’ve written, just read it aloud, and it helps you to find different ways of making your copy better.
And also, there is a less evident benefit, I guess, if we’re talking about accessibility. We have some people with, say, visual impairments who use screen readers, and these readers work like this. They just go line by line, and you can just put yourself into your user’s shoes and see and hear how it could sound for them.
Ryan: I love that idea. That’s a really cool idea. You give us several different principles in your article for kind of using microcopy to help users better understand how to interact with UI elements. Can you give us kind of one or two ways that we can write microcopy that kind of better helps the user understand what they’re supposed to do?
Irina: There’s actually a catch in this question, I guess, because I’d say that we don’t really need to tailor our microcopy to that, to adjust it to this because interfaces have been around for quite a while, and users have worked out their own patterns, the ways they interact with interfaces, and usually users know that this is a button, you should click it. This is an underlined text, so that’s probably a link. So usually there is no need to explain how to interact with UI elements with your copy. It’s excessive. And what’s more, it can often be a symptom that your interface is not intuitive enough if you have to do this.
Actually, there is a great example of how we become reliant on such things as common design patterns and interaction patterns. There is, it’s quite an old website, it’s called User Inyerface, like Interface, but with Y. And it was designed to break all the interaction patterns. So they have this huge green button that says “No” and leads to some destructive action. They have texts that are not underlined and they are linked, and so on and so forth. When you’re trying to perform some actions with this website to, I don’t know, sign up or something, you just see how it’s difficult when someone tries to break your habitual interaction pattern. And it’s a really great example of how we are intuitively using user interfaces without even understanding that we’re so used to it.
Ryan: So really we want kind of minimal microcopy because the user is going to go on intuition of design to kind of guide them through the process.
Irina: Yeah, I’d say that’s an ideal scenario. It’s actually the very common question that employers ask at job interviews, like, how do you see your ideal user interface? And I always go, “Oh, this is just one button and nothing else. So an ideal interface, it just knows what you want from it and just gives you an option to get it.”
But unfortunately we, well, as of now, at least we can’t imagine that we’re having this luxury of such interfaces. And I assume in some cases we need to give extra guidance for our users on how to interact with elements. Say we have a list of options and we need our users to select, say, five of them. So we want to add this information, say, under the title of this list. Or if we are using some fancy feature that is not widely adopted, say, turning your phone down to blur your account data or shaking your phone to do something. These are not very habitual actions. So we wanted to add some, say, onboarding screen to help our users get into it.
Ryan: Great. So we want to help users if things aren’t intuitive, kind of how to use these elements of the interface. So you also give a lot of kind of style and phrasing advice in your article for kind of phrases to avoid or ways to phrase things. Can you give us a couple of those as we’re thinking about writing microcopy, some style and phrasing techniques we can use?
Irina: Yeah, I give some examples in my article, but we need to understand that it’s not cut in stone. It really depends on the product we are working on. It’s really hard to think of some universal guidelines because we can have like brand’s voice and tone. And when writing microcopy, you want to stick to it to be consistent across all the touch points, across all communications. And also there are a lot of things to keep in mind when creating microcopy, apart from brand’s tone or voice.
There is a separate issue such as writing for products intended for localization. It also requires a slightly different approach. Say, we want to stick to subject-verb object structure because it’s more familiar and it’s present in most of the languages, even though they can have some peculiarities. And we want to add some articles, even though it may seem counterintuitive for microcopy, but we want our copy to be unequivocal so we could translate it the way we intended to.
As a rule of thumb, if I had to name just one thing applicable everywhere, it would be this: be to the point, be clear, and cut out anything that doesn’t add to the meaning, like excessive politeness or in-depth explanations and so on. So priority and conciseness, and of course, understanding your user is the key.
Ryan: That’s great. I do have a question. You do a lot of localization. Do you find that cultures in general, like do cultures expect different levels of politeness for the interface or is it about the same expectation everywhere?
Irina: Yeah, that’s a huge, that’s a separate and huge topic.
Ryan: If you don’t want to get into it, that’s okay. I’m just curious. I just kind of got me thinking of that right now.
Irina: Well, I can’t put my finger on like politeness topic, but I can definitely say that for some cultures, motivation through prestige works better than for the others. For example, in some countries in Asia.
I have a case, I have a story from my work experience. Personally, I think of it as of my failure as a UX writer. I had a fierce fight with my product manager and he insisted that we were working on a brokerage account and he insisted that we need an action button, a signup button to sound like “Become an investor” instead of, I don’t know, “Start opening an account” or “Open an account,” which would be more precise and it would be more transparent. It’s just a UX writing approach you usually apply.
But I surrendered and we had this button and it worked well. It’s just boosted our conversions in just like one particular country. That was a very exciting experience to me and that was unexpected. I just couldn’t imagine that that really worked for someone.
Ryan: That’s a great example. And I know you weren’t prepared for that at all. So that’s a cool example. Well, thank you so much. I had a ton of fun talking with you about this stuff today.
Irina: Yeah. Thank you.