Comments on: Looking for examples of microcopy

By: Jordan

Jordan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:23:25 +0000

Some of those have more fine print than what you would look for in a Life Insurance policy!

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:31:48 +0000

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.

By: Albert

Albert — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:28:22 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:36:38 +0000

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.