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Writing effective app copy
- 1. Writing effective appcopy Sarah Day @scribblingfox Ready? GO!
- 3. What’s app copy? Applicationcopy is any text element in your product that your users read Tooltips, placeholder text, CTAs/buttons, error messages & confirmations, headers, feature names, subtitles, descriptions, and more
- 4. What’s app copy? Applicationcopy is any text element in your product that your users read Tooltips, placeholder text, CTAs/buttons, error messages & confirmations, headers, feature names, subtitles, descriptions, and more Application copy is not: ● Information generated by the system (dates and times, variable counts) ● Visual/design elements (star ratings, progress bars)
- 5. Application copy isdocumentation for people who don’t read documentation.
- 7. How do Istart writing application copy? WHAT does this do? ● Feature names, field names HOW do I use it? ● Placeholder text, CTAs, walkthroughs WHY should I care? ● Business cases, value props, contextual explanations. In enterprise products, some features names are “Why” copy elements.
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- 11. Worst Practices Assuming youruserbase is as technical as your engineers ● “Submit a pull request” vs. “Get” Wordiness ● “This feature is intended to let you do a million things which I will now list in alphabetical order…” vs. “From here, you can add and edit your settings” Workflow disruption ● “To learn more about enabling this feature, read our KB article…” vs. “You just enabled this feature! Click here to learn more.” Localized/regional language
- 12. Best practices Write tothe What/How/Why of each field ...and don’t be afraid to re-work visual elements to convey meaning more effectively Internationalize, or have a plan to do so later Put variables at the end of strings whenever possible. Avoid jargon and slang. Use CTAs as confirmations “Cancel / Continue” vs. “Erase draft / Save draft” Write with mobile in mind Is it eight words long? Can you make it three? Can you make it one?
Editor's Notes
- #2 Hi there! You might remember me from last month’s meetup. Sarah Day, Technical Content Strategist @ BetterWorks Giving this talk, but bigger and better, at Write the Docs in Portland in May For this talk, I’m going to use a popular reading website and app as an example.
- #3 This is the homepage of Goodreads, a social media site owned by Amazon, where people can connect with their friends, track their reading habits, and get recommendations for new books. This page puts a lot of user-generated and advertising content front and center, but if you dig deep, there’s some very smart app copy writing.
- #4 App copy is...
- #5 App copy is not… Who cares? Why not just put basic stuff in there and direct them to the docs?
- #6 App copy is like micro-documentation. It’s your opportunity to inform, engage, and empower your users without directing them out of your product or overwhelming them with too much context-free information.
- #7 Let’s go back to goodreads. I’ve called out many instances of the application copy types I just mentioned. Note that I didn’t call out the star rating system for the books, or the advertisement in the right sidebar, or the date and timestamps, or any of the userpics. When you break it down like this, you can see there are dozens of pieces of app copy in every page of a product. Each of these items is an opportunity to teach, engage, and empower.
- #8 Any piece of effective application copy is answering at least one of these questions.
- #9 What am I looking at?
- #10 How do I interact with this page?
- #11 WHY am I getting this recommendation? Because I like Fiction and Suspense, so I might like this too.
- #12 Do I still have time? OKAY!