UX Writing- How to Engage and Sell
A beginner’s guide to engaging and selling with your words.
Stringing words that perfectly communicates your desired messages and prompts your audience to tilt their focus and actions towards your envisioned direction is not a skill everyone has, but it can be mastered if consistent.
In the words of Chelsea Armstrong, “UX copywriting, or user-experience copywriting, is the act of writing and structuring copy that moves digital users, like visitors and customers, towards intuitively accomplishing a goal.”
To simplify, design captivates and engages your users while UX Writing breaks down the process of achieving a goal, explains why and where to click, therefore compelling users to take action.
UX Writing functions as a way of
- Onboarding new users to your product or services.
- Imploring users to carry out a specified action
- Guiding a user through the process of achieving their goal by using FAQs, Help guides, Documentations, etc.
- Giving feedback to actions and expectations ( error messages, confirmation messages, etc.
- Improve user’s interaction with your products.
How can you write smart copies?
▹ Define your Message and Audience
We start by defining how best to captivate the prospect, user or audience, which means we need to know what makes them tick — so we can figure out how to talk them into buying our way of thinking.
Copies need to be of interest to the readers. In other words, the user should have an answer (s) to the question- “What’s in it for me?”. To begin, jot down what you need to take place as a result of your phrases being read and attempt to prioritize them as follows.
I want my audience to:
- Know: What I have set out to tell them
- Think: that I have their best interest at hand
- Do: something as a result of having read my words’
Exercise
We will write a product notification mail for a company that strictly produces chairs following the above sequence
I want my audience to
- Know: that we produce one of the best work chairs
- Think: that our chairs will improve their seating posture and lessen their backaches.
- Do: Make further enquiries as to which solves their problems best and purchase a chair at least.
We have identified our target audience following this sequence and highlighted the product benefits and our desired result. We also have to provide answers to the question “Soooooo?” that we expect users to utter at every end of the sentence and cut off unnecessary jargon… Below is a scenario
- Company: We sell the best work chairs🤓
- Users: So? (how are your chairs different)😏
- Company: They prevent you from crouching when you sit and lessen the back discomfort😌
- User: Oh?🤔
- Company: HURRY NOW! Only 3 chairs left at a 7% discount 😈
- Users: Okay do you deliver to… *inputs address*🏃🏽♀️️💃🏽💸
From the above, you can see how we have directed the emotions of our prospects towards the line we want. After cutting out the unnecessary jargon as you deem fit. We can now have
“ 9 out of 10 people suffer from chronic back pain, are you one? Our work chairs now on 20% discount. Get Yours Now! 2 hours left”.
▹ The 3 Cs
With the attention of a millennial at a short 12 seconds and the average span of a Gen Z at mere 8 seconds, it is safe to say precise content is what encourages users to interact and understand your product’s goals. Given that, we want to follow the law of the 3 Cs;
Make sure it is
Clear: Clarity is everything. To achieve this, eliminate unnecessary repetition, and move from the double negative
Concise: Smart UX Writing i s deciding whether a piece of writing is important or not. The goal is to give a more professional feel to your work of art and eliminate redundant words and tautology.
Example:
Don’t: Trew is one of the best companies at offering mentorship, guidance and tutorial programs for free.
Do: Trew is the best at providing training and mentoring services for free.
Consistent: Another important secret to efficient UX Writing is adhering to the same rules throughout a piece of writing such as tone of voice, format, verb tense, punctuation etc
▹ Your choice of words in relation to the platform you’re writing for matters
For each type of platform, you’re writing for, there are a group of words that are popular and specifically used in communicating with users of the product or services.
In a financial institution, words like budget, transactions, etc will be used as opposed to other institutions. In such institutions, words such as “transactions” will be considered more appropriate compared to words like “agreements and “dealings”. Get familiar with the platform’s target audience and vocabulary.
▹ Supplement your Writings with Visuals
The ‘show, don’t tell’ principle applies to effectively communicating with people in whatever chosen career field you find yourself in. In cases where it might be confusing for users to understand the messages(s) or action (s), they’re to perform or, imagery can step in to support and deliver such messages.
▹ Employ verbs that connote end action or result.
In communicating with your target audience, use specific verbs such as “save, “connect”, “discover” as opposed to generic verbs like “manage”.
Although there is a varied opinion on what constitutes a good microcopy, a few of mine are
- Good Ux Writing is either used to explain/breakdown information to users or action-oriented
- It helps you get started with a process and explains how to achieve desired goals.
- It clearly communicates feedback and options
- Good copies set expectations for users. For example, Medium’s representation of estimated reading time for a writeup.
5. It provides context and helps users by providing:
✓ Assistance:
✓ Reassurance:
✓ Advice:
✓ Information:
Thanks for reading 💕. I’ll love to have feedback from you whether it’s on my writing, methodology, or any other thing you think I should improve. Don’t forget to clap👏🏾 for me if you love this article and leave a comment if you have any questions.
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