Control Your Ego, We Are Not Users!

Throughout my dive into UX writing at work, I’ve often experienced emotional ups and downs over the various microcopies I made in each sprint.

As a result, the microcopy I produced seemed urgent, astonishing, and unclear to impacted users. Because of this bad experience, I want to share my story.

There are several things that we need to pay attention to when we get emotional about various microcopy.

Do not confuse users

Although we will create a pop-up microcopy which is an easy guide for users. Just say clearly what the guide is like -> provide a clear guideline -> not complicated -> user can take action and achieve.

Do not also make a microcopy that reads ambiguously. We must be clear and not fickle. Again, throw away ambiguous sentences!

Empathy and sympathy

In Javanese society in Indonesia, we know the parable of “sawang sinawang”, which means looking at each other in the life of ourselves and others. We can apply this parable to microcopy.

We can create it but that the microcopy that we have is correct, are we the only ones who can assume that it is all correct? Try to be more receptive to criticism and suggestions for the development of a better microcopy.

Understand once again, we are not the only users. Do A/B testing or usability testing (UT) with colleagues, participants, or people who have a linearity with the product we are designing.

Initial goal focus

Starting from a problem or experiment, remember the original goal: a product system to be user friendly. Simple. We help users feel more secure, easy and comfortable when surfing web pages and/or apps.

Do not expose problems to user’s

Still, regarding the previous point, we need to do it as simple as that. There is no need to present all the problems we have for the users to know. For example, you don’t need to make a sentence, “We know this situation makes the system unstable, try to log out and then sign back in.” Do not write like that. Make the user smoother and provide the best solution without any feeling.

Anticipate the user’s need

When you are writing for a product, it’s best to think of it as a one-sided conversation. You have to anticipate what the user would ask in each scenario and provide that information. For an empty state, you could leave the screen blank, but that would result in users guessing what to do next. Instead, it’s more helpful to say: “Here’s how you get started”.

Give users an argument

In some cases such as certain choices and answering questions, always insert fields or buttons to fill in the answers that are not in the choices. Do not be selfish! We do not know the details of user needs like what. Make users feel valued and we are not limited by the available options.

The False-Consensus Effect

The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. Only people who are very different from them would make different choices.

The false-consensus effect was first defined in 1977 by Ross, Greene, and House. They showed that unlike scientists, “layperson psychologists” (that is, all of us who are put into the position to guess how others would behave) tend to overestimate how many people share their choices, values, and judgments, and perceive alternate responses as rare, deviant, and more revealing of the responders.

Closing

Using the right emotions is not only useful for UX Writers, but also for other product developers/management teams such as Product Managers, UI/UX Designers, UX Researchers, and Engineers.

Thank you.

#UXnyaWejanginAja