Winding back text debt in digital products
The web industry in Melbourne, Australia has matured since I first got into it a little under 20 years ago. And founders are realising the errors of those early days. Along with the technical and UX debts they’re paying off, software companies are now beginning to perceive the burden of text debt.
These businesses always valued functional, reliable technology. But now they understand the importance of a strong brand, too. They can see the worth of good experience design. And they know their software doesn’t “sound” the way it should. So what can they do?
One option is to hire a UX writer. The problem is, if you only have one, you’ll probably create a bottleneck (and a job no one wants for long).
Another is to train your UX teams to write microcopy — to “design words” for interfaces. You’d be surprised by how quickly they learn.
It makes sense, after all: if you’re developing software, your teams are writing interface text already, whether or not they’re trained and confident to do so. And as you might suspect, right now most feel they’re simply making stabs in the dark and hoping they succeed.
That leads to problems for the product and, of course, the business.
“I’m not a writer anyway”
The refrain, “Well I’m not a writer anyway!” is a common excuse for leaving half-baked text in a design, according to one designer I know. But with a little more time, effort, and training, she believed she and her colleagues could be relied upon to produce genuinely useful, on-brand microcopy.
She was right. You don’t need to be a grammar genius to write good interface text. You just need to know what works — and how to spot the warning signs when something doesn’t.
After I showed her team those pitfalls, they quickly learned to find and fix them themselves. The outcome was human-centric microcopy that genuinely works to guide users through actions. Simple, huh?
The trials of translation
The Australian software brands I’ve worked with all want to take on the world! …with a friendly tone. But that can be a problem when it comes to translating a product for different cultures.
“I understand our in-product messaging,” a US-expat product manager once confided in me, “but I don’t know if other people, even from my country, would get it — let alone users in other places.”
Obviously the trials of translation don’t just apply to other languages. But for any product targeting a global market, the English-language interface also needs to work for people who have had to learn English as a second or other language. Of course, few of us understand what implications that has for microcopy until they’re explained to us.
Many teams, one voice?
A third challenge lies in distributing interface writing tasks among teams. As a business grows the number of teams working on different parts of the product, consistency of interface language and tone can become a problem even in a localised English interface.
Over time your nice, strong brand can be diluted into multiple personalities — an element of text debt that’s usually a nightmare to clean up down the track. That’s especially the case if tech-centric, or user-unfriendly language has been learned by your customers, becoming an unintentional part of your product lexicon that will take significant retraining (for staff as well as users) to change.
Educating those teams to write with a consistent approach and vocabulary allows you to develop a coherent voice over time. And since your product teams are at the coalface of interface revisions, they’re in the best position to make calls about updating old verbiage to make it consistent, too.
Where to begin
The good news is that you can start winding back your text debt now, if you want to. The designers and PMs I know are eager to learn how to hone their language skills to develop sound microcopy that’s fine to release without pro-writer review. Educating them is the key.
