So what happens when you add restrictions? Take space, for example. Now, your words need to fit inside a width of 70 pixels. Or take lexicon. No longer can you adorn your phrases with words like lexicon and adorn. And don’t forget syntax — make sure you use active voice, not passive voice.

Welcome to UX writing. It’s less like tackling a blank canvas, more like putting puzzle pieces together. Which can be immensely satisfying. But does it curtail a writer’s creativity? Does it reduce writing to what is, essentially, a paint-by-numbers exercise?

In other words, is UX writing ****ing boring?

Leave the sizzle to one side

Yesterday I was working on some ‘nudges’ in our app. Once someone creates their first typeform, we show them this message to inspire new ways to use the product.

One of our product managers suggested this instead:

How Barcelona’s best burger joint keeps sizzling with feedback

With my writer’s hat on, the suggested title is nicer. I like the word sizzle. I imagine a grill.

With my UX writer’s hat on, I think:

• Is it clear what ‘keeps sizzling’ represents? If feedback is the activity, what’s the end result? There are a range of readings here.
• We have users whose first language is not English. Would they all understand ‘joint’ and ‘sizzle’?
• We’re asking someone to stop what they’re doing, jump out of the product, and read an article. Is it perfectly clear what they’re going to learn from reading the article?

My response was to leave the sizzle to one side and stick with the original title (or improve it) in the product. We can use the more eye-catching title for the blog article.

Evocative loses out to straightforward.

Creepy and pervy

When it comes to UX writing, this ‘boring’ hangup we have is a personal insecurity. Our users aren’t scanning to be entertained (okay, some might. But they’re the exception). They’re scanning to quickly understand and take action. They’ve got something else in mind — something much more important than chuckling at our self-indulgent jokes.

It’s the difference between tourists and commuters. On the metro, tourists (to the frustration of regular commuters) value the experience in and of itself. They soak it up. Wallow in it. Wow, these trains are so much smaller! Look at all those lines! Ha, she said it — mind the gap! Commuters, on the other hand, just want to get to their destination as fast as possible. Simple communication like exit, step-free access, and doors open on the right-hand side provides just the essentials for doing so.

When I first started working on Typeform’s product, I thought I’d add my so-called personality to it. This is my time, I thought. Finally, I can show the world how creative I am.

An opportunity came up. We added a message to warn users that deleting a question from their typeform would also delete the logic they’d applied to that question.

Ha! I proclaimed, triumphant. A romantic relationship. I’m the king of metaphors.

Problem is, it’s the David Brent of system messages — desperate to get the joke in before you even know what’s going on.

A more effective message immediately tells you what’s going on, even if that means canning the comedy act.

Here’s another example from our old signup page:

And here’s what people thought about it:

Believe it or not, creepy and pervy, aren’t in our voice and tone guidelines. Point taken, copy changed:

Not only is the new copy not creepy, it actually gives you some useful information. Big thanks to Yuval Keshtcher and his UX Writing Hub community for the feedback.

In these cases, boring is beside the point. If things aren’t clear, you might as well be telling a joke to a cupboard door.

The voice and tone curve

There seems to be a ‘voice and tone curve’ that companies follow as they grow. Back in 2015, Mailchimp used to explicitly state that its voice was fun and weird.

Fast-forward to 2019. They still say they’re weird, but the emphasis is very much on plainspoken, and their humour is dry. We recently interviewed Erin Crews, Senior Content Strategy Manager at Mailchimp. Here’s what she said:

“We’ve spent a lot of time defining a more dry, deadpan style of humor as we grow up and move into more complex product spaces.”

At Typeform, as we’ve grown up, we’ve wrestled with this swing from merry to meh.

Take a look at our question tooltips from a year ago:

We had a grand old time thinking up a funny example for each question type. Then we realised they weren’t really the clearest way to show what each question was for.

Compare it to the copy we have now:

It’s only natural that the emphasis on clarity increases as you grow. With a small audience, you can afford to be a bit more niche. In fact, it might even be one of the reasons your early adopters are attracted to you. You’re refreshing. You offer something different.

As you expand, you start to reach people in other countries. Unless you truly localise your product, the jokes your early tribe find hilarious might leave your international audience clueless.

Sprinkle on the fun flakes

So you revise all your copy for distracting messages. You shed your identity as class clown. What’s left? Who are you?

Of course, you can be both helpful and interesting. There are tons of examples of companies who have done it effectively. The trick is knowing when to sprinkle on the fun flakes.

Clearing all those unread messages is a good feeling. The Slack team know it’s the right time to celebrate:

Now imagine you arrive at the airport. You left your house in a hurry, and you’re panicking about what time your flight leaves. You glance at the departures board.

At Stansted airport, they let you know you have time to relax:

And at the Typeform office, once you know the water’s not drinkable, we figured it’s fine to throw in a cheeky aside.

Stand out, fade away

If you’re someone who needs constant stimulation, perhaps. If you need everything to be on, all the time, like a method actor who never drops his character — then yes. The world might be a boring place for you.

Because good UX helps us navigate the world smoothly. If those same things were to distract us in the process it would defeat the purpose. A metal plate on a door tells us to push. A handle tells us to pull. We don’t think about it, we just act.

But for brands to connect with people, they need to be different. This is the enticing paradox of good UX: stand out, fade away. It means raising a smile while keeping someone on track. And that means finding a spark of creativity within a set of restrictions.

When Amazon started out, they had to keep costs down. So Jeff Bezos’s first desk was a door attached to four bits of wood.

And at Mailchimp, a mature brand isn’t stale — it’s ripe with opportunities. They used a rebrand to find ways to differentiate themselves. Here’s Erin again:

“We’re willing to be weirder than anyone else. That’s still something that sets us apart that we really embrace. And we’re not terribly worried about other companies adopting that.”

So no, UX writing isn’t boring. You just need to find a way to make your desk a door.

Is UX writing boring? was originally published in Writing at Typeform on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bristol, England. It’s 2:00 a.m. A hooded figure, identity unknown, climbs a ladder and begins to deface the name of a store. It’s not Banksy, although he comes from the same city. He’s no graffiti artist, either.

He’s the “ grammar vigilante.”

He comes out at night to correct errant punctuation. His weapon of choice? The “apostrophiser,” a broom-like contraption for reaching the highest storefronts to add-or remove-punctuation.

I joined Typeform around three years ago as a copywriter. Copy for job descriptions. Landing pages. Signs for the toilet doors. Anything that needed words.

Then Typeform version 2 happened and suddenly all eyes were on the product. Does the design feel intuitive? What kind of backend architecture makes sense? And like the Bristol grammar vigilante scanning the streets for rogue store signs, my eyes inevitably fell on the words.

Words like these:

Imagine popping into the attic for a quick tidy-up. You fumble around in the dark and find the light switch. Doesn’t look too bad, you think. You move a box, only to find another box behind it. And another one behind that.

You dive in. There’s stuff you vaguely remember from years ago. It’s a mess. Dust everywhere. Before you know it, you get sucked into a rabbit hole.

This is going to take a lot longer than you thought.

Clearing out the attic

The feeling was that the words in the product had been abandoned. Superfluous explanations, unclear labeling, inconsistencies. Oh, the inconsistencies. We’ll get to those later.

First, we did a content audit. We swept the product for the most eyebrow-raising messages and noted them down.

What did we find? Well, on a ‘friendliness’ scale, this red error message leans towards terrifying:

Our product was stuffed with tooltips-those hints that appear when you hover over a question mark. We crowbarred them in everywhere, even when the ‘hint’ was, well… a bit obvious:

And you don’t have to be a copywriter to spot the problem here:

Yep-turns out not all Typeform users are male.

So we immediately locked away the worst crimes against language and introduced friendlier, more helpful, gender-neutral messages. But there was more to do. Much more.

Doing away with dummy text

In theory everybody agreed that words were important. “Content is king!” someone would declare to a sea of nodding heads and grunts of affirmation. But in practice, people just left ‘the words bit’ for ‘the words person’ to do at the end.

To avoid more word fails, we needed to make copy a core part of the design process. That meant getting ‘influential stakeholders’ on board. So I turned to the Product Design team.

Product Designer Marianna recalls how things used to go down:

“Sometimes I spent hours on the copy, which meant less time designing. And sometimes I designed without the copy, which made my wireframes misleading when I presented them.”

It turned out design needed copy as much as copy needed design.

Our product’s language was an afterthought-not a carefully crafted tool that helped people get stuff done. We’d pull aside anyone with a pulse to add “just a few quick words” so the design had at least something to communicate. But using dummy text instead of something more thought-through made early designs harder to understand.

And in some cases, we forgot to remove the dummy text altogether:

Here’s Sarai, a former product designer at Typeform:

“Words are like anchors — they’re key to communication. So when we use placeholder text in our designs, it makes things more ambiguous. Say no to lorem ipsum!”

As per Sarai’s plea — just like I’d done at school — I said no to Latin. We got rid of ipsum and started using useful, workable copy in the design process. The Product Design team invited me to their review meetings, and I stepped into a baffling world of pixels, information architecture, and components.

Copy and design were becoming one.

Talking the same language

When no one’s responsible for UX copy, everyone’s sort of responsible. So in the years BC (Before Copy), our product had developed ‘too many cooks’ syndrome.

Designers added copy. Then it was refined by a product owner. An engineer perhaps added something if it was needed last minute. Not all those people were native English speakers.

In other words, everyone threw in their dos centimos. Which was great for fostering a we’re-all-in-this-together glowing team sensation. Not so great for consistency.

Check out the random capitalization in this dropdown menu:

It helped that we now had one person responsible for words in the product. But even so, there was still no source of truth on which to base decisions. It wasn’t just about capital letters — it was about the way we spoke as well.

We needed a style guide. Here’s our chief storyteller Paul:

“We need a style guide.”

How do you find your style? We looked at our founders. Literally.

We observed them doing monkey impressions at a company meeting. Breaking into fits of laughter trying to deliver a speech at the Christmas party. Sumo wrestling at our annual summer event.

We decided their easygoing personalities had to inform the style guide. They became the inspiration for our voice and tone.

Here’s Marianna again on how that helped:

“I really believe in our product’s voice and tone. It’s part of our identity. Before, we were communicating things in too many different ways. Now, we’re all talking the same language.”

The guiding principle? SURF: simple, useful, remarkable, and friendly. And sometimes weird.

Now we could look at a bland, uninformative message like this…

…and change it based on our style guide.

But we didn’t always get it right. Once you find your personality, it’s tempting to go overboard:

If you don’t adapt your tone to make your message clear, your ‘sparkling personality’ falls flat. It becomes the reason your audience avoids you. Our founders did monkey impressions at an informal company meeting-not at a pitch to potential investors.

Here’s attempt number three:

Clarity > clowning around.

Taking the words out of their mouths

The sticky-fingered Pablo Picasso once said: “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

We didn’t steal much before. When we built a new feature, we’d name it based on gut instinct.

For example, there’s a feature that lets you take information from one place in your form and feed it into another. We reasoned that the information you take can vary. So we called the feature Variables.

But when we ran a test asking new users to feed info from A to B, they skipped right past Variables — assuming it was for something else. One of them said:

“I need to be able to recall the answer to this question. If there is a way, there’s not an obvious way.”

“ Recall the answer to this question.” That sounded… nice. Simple. Human.

So we changed the name of Variables to Recall information and ran the test again. The task success rate increased from 25% to 100%, which means everyone tested found the feature they needed based on the new label.

Making the change permanent was a no-brainer:

Stuck with what to name a particularly abstract feature? Ask your customers to try it out, then do a Picasso and steal their words.

Obsessing-it’s healthy

Why obsess over things like pronouns, capitalization, tone, and labels? Who cares?

Well, our users care. We know because they tell us.

Our job is to care about what our users care about. That’s why we’ll continue to prowl around our product, armed with an apostrophiser.

→ Are you a word vigilante? Tell us what you think about our copy.

Originally published at https://www.typeform.com on June 25, 2019.

The rise of microcopy at Typeform was originally published in Writing at Typeform on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.