Microcopy: Why it’s so important for great UX

Microcopy is everywhere. It’s tiny bits of copy, usually a few words or a sentence which help guide a user through a journey or action.

As I draft this in Google Docs I can see a great example of Microcopy. It’s in the top toolbar and says ‘Last edit was seconds ago’. This small piece of Microcopy is really helpful, especially when you reopen a collaborative document after a couple of days. It prompts me to see the new edits from other collaborators which is great to get an overview of the changes made before I continue with my edits.

The Microcopy on LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitters ‘Create Post’ screens are excellent examples - they’re all questions which prompts you for an answer and the way they’re written suggests a particular way to answer and pretty much sums up the goal of each platform.

• Linkedin: ‘What do you want to talk about?’ aligns with LinkedIn’s goal of connecting professionals and suggests that your answer could be a specific topic.
• Facebook: ‘What’s on your mind?’ aligns with Facebook’s goal of getting their users to share things, and their users sure do share what’s on their mind, don't they?!
• Twitter: ‘What’s happening?’ aligns with Twitter’s goal of getting users to share what’s happening in the world around them and feels a little more ‘immediate’.

Labelling buttons with informative Microcopy is one of the most important and easiest places to start if you’re auditing and improving your website / digital product.

Ditch generic language such as ‘Submit’, ‘Continue’ and ‘Next’ and replace it with something more engaging and indicative of what will happen after pressing the button. At a checkout this could be ‘Continue to Payment Information’ or ‘Continue to Delivery Address Information’. We're setting expectations for the user and this helps to alleviate their anxieties about what happens next in their journey.

You can use the user’s voice on buttons where decisions are to be made, it’s a great tip as you’re not telling them what to do directly. ‘Create my Account’ is a good example of this. Use this technique sparingly, it will lose impact if overused.

Establish trust with your Microcopy on sign-up forms. Replace the generic ‘Sign up now’ form title with ‘Sign up for free to receive X, Y or Z’ to give the user a reason to do it.

Another way of establishing a user’s trust is with an explanation of why you’re asking for a particular piece of customer information, a short sentence about why you’re asking for their phone number and exactly what you intend to do with it will help alleviate privacy worries.

Motivate your the user to complete the action, for example you could include something like ‘Over 20,000 students are enjoying X, Y or Z’ to show potential users how big the customer base is, and therefore, show it’s trustworthiness.

We all know how frustrating it is when you get an unhelpful error message when filling out a form.

A few great tips for reducing user frustration:

Suggest the format that the user should use to enter their information in - this is great for dates, phone numbers and postcodes where users could input information in various different formats. This avoids the error happening in the first place.

Keep the error message specific and in context of the field where the error is. Below the field or to the side of it is best practise. It’s good to summarise the errors at the top of the form but be sure to make the fields stand out for the user to easily spot!

Use Microcopy to offer a solution. Let’s take a password error for example, the default or lazy error message would be something along the lines of ‘Invalid password’. This isn’t helpful. It’s guaranteed to frustrate the user at a crucial part in their journey and they could be thinking...

• Why is my password invalid?
• What do I do to correct it?
• Why isn’t the error message next to the password field where the error is?
• Why didn’t you give me specific instructions before entering my password?
• Why is the language so robotic?
• Why do you hate me?
• Ugh.

Instead, let’s be helpful and include a hint with the field which could say something like “Your password needs to be between 6-20 characters long.” so they can be on their merry way.

This one is pretty straight-forward and defninitely a quick win if you’re looking to improve Microcopy site wide. Be specific and tell your users what they can search for, if there’s multiple criteria then that’s great for them to know!

• Short and concise
• Helpful
• Unambiguous language
• A conversational tone
• Always keep it contextual
• Set expectations
• Be specific. Microcopy can never be too specific.

You’re sure to start noticing Microcopy everywhere now!