The Value of Microcopy and a 30/60/90 Day Plan

Summary

Microcopy or content design can be a critical aspect of the design of digital products and services. In summary, UX writing is about creating text that improves the user experience by making interfaces more user-friendly, informative and engaging. It involves a user-centred, empathetic and data-driven approach, along with collaboration and consistency, to create an effective and enjoyable user journey.

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Why a 30/60/90 Day-Plan is valueable

It all starts with problems with words and the team not knowing how to fix them. The plan is divided into three phases where the work can be done thoroughly but not perfectly. The general purpose is to fix the words, create a basis for collaboration, iteration and a better experience overall. It is important to get more visibility, to do some self-promotion.  

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Phase 1: What and Who (First 30 Days)

You need to know what is important for the team

• Build teams confidence
• Find couple of key teammates to gain wide possible perspective of your organization (preferred with broad knowledge & different kind of views)
• Ask the questions:  
  • Who is on the team?  
  • Who is affect what people will encounter?

• Write down names from people from your organization: marketing, product managers, product owners, trainer, analysts and executives.

• Try to draw everything in a diagram and ask your key contacts to correct it

• Arrange meetings with every section/team you found
  • Gather information about organization, product, goals, customers
  • Introduce people working with you (getting people to know how it is working with a UX writer, UX content strategist)

STEP 1: In your invitation, you should write something like:  

"Hi, I'm the new content person on product X. Your name came up as a person who's important to the product and team, and I'm hoping to learn more from you."

STEP 2: Next, choose a time that's likely to be convenient for them and make sure that you have enough time in your calendar to consolidate learnings between meetings.

To prepare for the meetings, make a mostly empty document, whether that's a slide deck or text document.  

You can use headings to create structure and then fill in the information that you know so far. I recommend keeping the document rough and unpretty to make it clear that you're spending time learning the information, not "polishing" the presentation. It's also shareable, and you'll want to make the link or document available to the people you meet with.

Important:  

• Before meeting: prepare and share the briefest version of  

• all you know about

• what you want to know

• that you know what you don’t know it yet and  

• that sharing these things will be valuable to you.  

In general it is always helpful to give context to this shared information.  

The Document should contain:  

1. Definition of the experience
2. Customer motives
3. Organizational priorities
4. Priorities for content strategy
5. Team/stakeholders
6. List of existing content
7. Reviewers
8. Terminology

• During meeting: start building working relationship, discuss experience customer, business and priorities

• Listen, take notes and move on.  

Example questions:

• What's the most important part of the experience?

• Who are the customers?  

• How do these people solve the problem right now? How is that experience different?

• What's important to them? What motivates them? What are their priorities, their desires? Do we know what they like or dislike?

• Among the people making and supporting the experience, who will be an ally in making a great experience? What are their motivations, hopes, desires for it?

• In the organization or industry, is there anything working against
 us? Is there anything working in our favor?

• What's the most important thing I can work on: Where are the words broken, or where can the words help the most?  

Tasks:

• Listen and learn

• Present document and take notes

• Structure notes afterwards, consolidate

• Searching for a folder, repository, documentation etc.  

• Note unusal words, attempt definitions to them  

• Get feedback from teammates and let them correct  

Next Steps:  

• Start with some first writing tasks, f.e. error messages, mails etc.  

• First testing tasks can help to get to know who will use the experience, what the organizational purpose is and how the person’s and organization’s priorities can be expressed in the UX  

• Demonstrate how are you working: asking questions about goals, purposes, measurement of success and drafting UX text in the designs

• Write your texts in Figma to show the connection between design and UX writing.  

• First (before writing): search for existing resources (voice, tone, brand guidelines, style guides, principles)

• Write now 3 good options for the content (effective for the person and the organization); the options should be very different from each other

• Start a team conversation about purpose of UX text and build their understanding about the power of words

• When agreed on one of these text options: “Who else should be reviewing this?” (maybe you have some ideas from the interviews, could add some names here); sending the list of recommendations, put your favorite at the first place (including reasons for that)

End of the first 30 days: talked to most of the right people, drafted first text, be in the right meetings and channels.

Document should contain now:

• A prioritized list of tasks to produce or improve UX content

• Motivations and priorities of the people who use the experience

• Organizations priorities and constraints

• Beginnings of the lists: channels, content reviewers, terminology

• Links or images of first, tactical content work

You are ready for Phase 2 when having built some relationship with the team.

Phase 2: Fires and Foundations: (30-60 days)

At this stage, you should provide a content development platform for testing and ensure that the work is strategically aligned and prioritised with the development plan. It is important to measure the baseline of how UX content is meeting business goals and conduct research to identify areas of difficulty or failure.    

In Phase 2, the next step would be to record your own experiences, take screenshots and consult existing usability research (if available). Apply heuristic scoring to the existing content and produce an initial report of your findings, including user behaviour and sentiment. This should provide an overview of what is working effectively, what needs improvement and which tasks should be prioritised.  

The next step is to share the information informally with your direct team members. It should outline the issues, but avoid sharing it too widely, as it is important to acknowledge the hard work of the UX team and respect their efforts. Use the report as a benchmark for future work, to measure progress and lay the groundwork for working and collaborating more effectively.  

Implement tools for content creation, sharing and organisation, and to integrate the work process into the team by tracking, managing and prioritising tasks.

Stay on the Track:

When the first 30 days end there should be a basic sketch of content work to be done. In the meantime, you should have got some requests for single pieces of UX text; f.e. error messages, articles, notifications. It could be helpful to track the content work to be done. Because it could help you to prioritize and organize the information of UX content tasks. And it helps to see where your work in concentrated, what is done, where do you have to engage more - you could find these blind spots where you can help to avoid problems in the future.

Once the initial 30-day period has been completed, a preliminary outline of the content work to be undertaken should be available. In the meantime, it is anticipated that requests for individual UX text components, such as error messages, articles, and notifications, will have been received. It may be beneficial to track the content work to be completed, as this could assist in the prioritisation and organisation of UX content tasks. It is also beneficial to be able to see where your work is concentrated, what has been done, and where you need to engage more. This allows you to identify potential areas for improvement and avoid future problems.

Minimum Viable Process:

• Toolchain interviews with engineering, design and product teams to understand the process for publishing UX copy and code reviews  

• Does this delivery method work for them? Are they getting feedback? How do you get input from people?  

• Listen to what people expect from you and set up a process so that stakeholders know what to expect from you.  

• Push for tools that make the process as simple as possible.  

• Just try to understand how they work, how you can optimise your involvement, how you can assign tasks to engineers.  

• Gut feeling: the words feel right in the experience.

• Draw the basic content process.

Document the content strategy

To document your content strategy, think systematically about the deep connective tissue of content. It is important that your team understands the systemic importance of content. Documentation can help you demonstrate how useful it is to the organisation.

In the future internal strategy could be make tactical decisions easier, faster and more consistently.  

• Voice charts guide the direction of content creation and iterations

• Terminology lists create consistency and reduce time  

• List of UX content reviewers include appropriate people  

• Priorities and goals are documented by defining core UX problems that need to be solved

Documents and content design systems need to be developed further. They should be reviewed at least annually and updated to reflect organisational changes.

Milestones for the end of second phase:

• New content should be created
• New tracking system and process established
• Poorly performing content updated
• Legal sign-off on a piece of liability sensitive text
• Marketing sign-off on a piece of brand-sensitive text

Indicators of trust have appeared if leaders including you as the responsible party for UX text or you have got some casual requests and active participation in early design thinking process.

About 75% of this strategic work is complete if:

• There is a tracking system for content tasks

• You have made some alignment about motivation an priorities

• The knowledge of existing content is there, and you know how to access it

• You have a terminology list and a voice chart

—> UX content should now have an enormous impact on the quality and effectiveness of the experience.

Phase 3: 60-90 Days – Rapid Growth

In phase 3, the strategy is nearly done. You should present your work and get some commitment. That’s important to validate and support the work you are doing.  

The Presentation should include:  

• tracking process

• list of current tasks

• content landscape

• alignment on motivations and priorities

• terminology list

• voice chart

You should also cover all important ideas and ask for feedback to get some corrections to be successful in the future. You should respond to enquiries, make requests for content changes and work with the team to design new experiences.

Phase 3 is over when process of creating content for experience is healthy enough to broaden the scope.  

1. Check trends in the field
2. Strengthen the connections with marketing, operations and knowledge management
3. Investigate opportunities in the industry
4. Using machine learning to prewrite text and seek out new research (best practices about titels, labels, accessibility and inclusion)

To fix the words you should build strong foundations

• Start by understanding goals and organizational needs

• Fix urgent problems while building foundations to demonstrate the effect of future work

• Uses power of content tools from the beginning, to be more effective than before

• Doing the work visibly, making the content tasks visible, team understands that it is effort to work on UX content and it has goals for engineering, design and organization.  

• UX content should go from being a source of pain to being valued.

With the UX content you should meet two goals - Organization and people needs.  

In general, listen to people, prioritze work and collaborate with your team. Use the Eisenhower matrix for UX content tasks (it is either urgent or not urgent and either important or not important.)  

Updating current experience should be prioritised to prepare for the future of design and research.  

Researchers should use the best possible words in their usability and concept studies to evoke the information that will be most useful later. The main goal is to create, iterate and measure the UX content.  

ROI of UX Writing:

It helps users to complete actions successfully. It should help remove barriers and encourage progress. The goal is to create a positive experience and engage the user, improve usability and enhance branding and differentiation.  

I am convinced that investing in UX writing will guarantee ROI and increase profit margins.

1. A clearer path > more users successfully complete actions

2. A reassuring environment > more users successfully complete actions

3. More motivation > more user activity

4. High emotional involvement > more user activity

UX Writers often conduct A/B testing to determine which phrasing or wording resonates better with users. This data-driven approach helps optimize the text for improved user engagement and conversions.

User testing is a valuable exercise. It helps UX writers gather feedback on how users interact with the text and make improvements based on real user experiences.  

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Source:

Podmajersky, Torrey (2019): Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word. (p. 149-167)