Key UX Text Writing Strategies To Enhance User Interaction and Strengthen Brand Identity.

In any user experience, the main aim of the UX text is to assist both the user and the business in reaching their goals. 

UX text can achieve this by providing the correct information at the right time. Context is important in determining what information to give and when to give it.

Understanding the user’s perspective is key for a UX text. This involves comprehending how users think and feel, what they aspire to achieve, and what motivates them.

Equally important is understanding the business’s objectives and how the product aids in achieving them. This user-centric approach is crucial for creating engaging and effective UX text.

UX text is not just about providing instructions and facts. It has the power to express the brand’s personality, making the user experience unique and engaging.

By using words and grammar purposefully, keeping the brand’s voice and goals in mind, UX text can create a cohesive and engaging brand experience that sets the brand apart.

Following are the 5 UX Text Writing Strategies:

1. Begin with Research

Before creating any guidelines, it’s essential to thoroughly understand the product, the target users, the business objectives, and the industry landscape.

Knowing who will use the product is crucial. What motivates them? What are their goals? What language do they use? Collaborating with a UX researcher can provide deep insights into the users. Additionally, exploring comments, forums, and articles related to the product or industry can reveal standard terms and expressions the audience uses.

For UX text writers, participating in user testing and interviews is not just valuable; it’s invaluable. It’s a unique opportunity to gain firsthand insights into how users interact with the product and how your words can enhance their experience. Your perspective and understanding are crucial in shaping the user experience and system architecture, making you feel valued and heard in the process.

• To align with business goals, it’s necessary to understand the company’s objectives and strategies. This can be achieved by discussing with senior management, who can outline the business goals and plans.
• Understanding the competitive landscape and industry challenges is also vital. Researching competitors, conversing with colleagues, and attending industry events can provide information about market positioning and differentiation strategies.

2. Building the Voice and Tone of the Brand

When crafting a unified user experience, it’s essential to distinguish between voice and tone. Think of voice as the brand’s personality and tone as the mood this personality adopts in different situations.

The voice should remain consistent throughout to maintain a cohesive brand image, while the tone adjusts to suit the context.

Setting clear guidelines is important to ensure the brand voice stays consistent. These guidelines help writers approach various pieces of text and make decisions when choosing between different wording options. 

A Voice Chart can serve as this guideline, ensuring uniformity across all UX text writing.

Voice Chart Elements

Product Principles: These are established by management to reflect the brand’s positioning and values. They describe how the product should be experienced and its role in users’ lives. The UX text writer’s job is to articulate these principles effectively.

Concepts: Highlight the key ideas or themes the organization wants to emphasize.

Vocabulary: Define specific words to use or avoid, ensuring the language aligns with the brand.

Verbosity: Provide guidance on the language style to use—whether the text should be elaborate with many adjectives or concise and direct.

Grammar: Offer rules on sentence structure, such as using complex sentences or passive voice.

Punctuation and Capitalization: Outline how to use punctuation marks and capitalization consistently (e.g., whether titles should have all words capitalized or just the first word).

A UX text writer can maintain a consistent voice and appropriate tone by following these elements, contributing to a seamless and engaging user experience.

3. Creating a Persona

Developing an Experience Persona can guide the UX writer in using the right voice. Begin by envisioning a natural person: consider their age, how they communicate, and their background story. 

When writing, imagine how this person would express themselves. This approach helps embody the brand’s personality and maintain a consistent voice throughout the user experience.

4. Conversational Experience

Despite the abundance of digital devices, we remain human and seek human interaction. Our brains are wired for the familiar patterns of human communication, and we feel at ease when these patterns are recognized, even when interacting with a screen. This is why the experience should be conversational.

Conversational doesn’t mean casual; it means transforming rigid, mechanical language into a flow that feels like a real conversation. The experience should mimic human interaction by using titles, buttons, labels, and other elements that mirror the logic of a natural conversation.

5. Conversational Design

To ensure the experience mimics real-life interactions, UX writers can follow these steps:

1. Frame It: Identify which part of the experience you’re analyzing. Define the start and end points, and clarify both the user’s and the organization’s goals.
2. Roleplay: Recruit colleagues to roleplay. One will act as the user, and another will represent the experience.
3. Take Notes: Document the conversation that occurs between them.
4. Organize and Design: Use your notes to create a structured experience. Develop a step-by-step flow based on the conversation to achieve the goal.
5. Translate Phrases: Convert the phrases from the roleplay into elements of the experience. The experience’s phrases become titles, labels, and descriptions, while the user’s phrases become buttons and options.

Users don’t visit a product to read lengthy explanations or error messages.

They often scan rather than read, looking for information that helps them move forward quickly.

That’s why it’s essential to provide transparent, concise, timely, purposeful, accessible, and conversational text.

• Clear: Clear UX writing guides users forward and minimizes cognitive load. Actions should have unambiguous outcomes, terms should be used consistently, and concepts should be clearly explained. Users should always be aware of what will happen if they press a button.
• Concise: The goal is to convey information quickly. Aim for short explanations, ideally around 40 characters per line and no more than three lines of text.
• Purposeful: The text should fulfil the needs of both the user and the organization.
• Timely: Information should appear at the right moment in the user journey and avoid providing unnecessary details.
• Accessible: Ensure the language is easy to understand and navigate, including considerations for people with disabilities. Use alt texts to make the experience compatible with screen readers.
• Conversational: Following a conversational style makes the experience feel more natural and logical, resembling human interaction.

By adhering to these principles, UX writing can create a more effective and user-friendly experience.

Read more articles exploring the dynamic interplay between design, user experience, artificial intelligence, and technology here.