November 12th, 2009
Looking for examples of microcopy
by Joshua Porter | 
4 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/1564
I’ve set up a new Flickr group with the express intent of aggregating examples of microcopy, that tiny copy (often shorter than a sentence) that helps clarify, explain, reduce commitment, or otherwise assuage someone performing (or considering) a task. You can find the group here:
Creating the group was prompted by Relly Annett-Baker, a web copy-writer from England who is putting together some materials on the subject and asked if I had some good examples. I had a few, but most of the good ones have come from other folks who are working on cool things. It occurred to me that a Flickr group might be a good way to garner more interesting, curious and far-flung examples.
So feel free to add your examples directly to the group…it is open to the public.
And, if you’ve never heard this term before, read Writing Microcopy.
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Comments
1. Jonathan 2:36pm, Sat 14th, 2009
The success or failure of micro (or indeed any) copy on the web is determined by whether it gets read. In turn, the thing that determines whether it gets read is whether the person using the system is inclined to read it at that time. And that inclination is determined primarily by three things: doubt, confusion, or fear.
If the person using the system has no doubt, confusion or fear about what they are doing or are about to do, then the chances of them reading any text in the UI is a great deal less than if they are experiencing those emotions. This is why people generally don’t read warning messages unless heavily interrupted, because most people don’t expect anything to be warned about.
So the skill of the UI designer is to find out whether there are any contextual cues to prompt those emotions. If there are not, then the designer must not put any text in the way of usability.
This is why (for example), I favour only flagging optional fields in web forms, and only using text that I think people may be inclined to read as a “crutch” in certain contexts.
Otherwise, I just shut the hell up.
2. Albert 7:28am, Mon 16th, 2009
Microblogging is really so important.
An advice on webforms: Spare the text where it’s not necessary in order to get the full attention on where it truly is.
3. Tom 10:31am, Fri 20th, 2009
Microcopy is a great way to make things clearer. I used to track all issues I had on my website and several of these problems were simply solved using microcopy. I also sometimes try to improve these sentences using multivariate testing.
4. Jordan 7:23pm, Mon 23rd, 2009
Some of those have more fine print than what you would look for in a Life Insurance policy!