Excessive Bold
Martin Fowler on the overuse of bold in technical writing — and how LLMs have picked up and spread this practice. The more you emphasize, the less power it has.
Read more [martinfowler.com]
Posts tagged with copywriting
Writing one sentence per line
– sive.rs
A nice writing tip by Derek Sivers
Read more [sive.rs]
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The art of the error message
Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.
To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.
Read more [thestyleofelements.org]
Don't design your emails
You can spend a lot of time to make emails look pretty, but it might be better to just don't style them at all. Greg Kogan did some A/B testing an concluded that sending plain emails results in more opens, clicks, replies, ...
Why are the plain emails crushing the performance of designed emails?
- They're less likely to be caught in spam filters. Having less HTML and fewer non-text elements such as images lowers the likelihood of triggering spam filters. You can use a free spam checker to validate this by testing plain and designed emails.
- They're less likely to go into the "Promotions" tab in Gmail (used by ~16% of all email users), for the same reasons above. From my testing, the plain emails typically end up in the Updates tab and some times even in the primary tab. Of course, the text in the email also affects this.
- They don't look like advertisements. The second the recipient interprets your email as an ad, promotion, or sales pitch—and it does take just a second—its chances of being read or acted upon plummet towards zero. A plain email leads people to start reading it before jumping to conclusions.
- They feel more personal. It's no handwritten note, but it's much more personal than an over-designed email with the recipient's first name crammed somewhere inside.
How to design words
John Saito, a designer at Dropbox, wrote down some very useful tips to improve the text in your UI.
Technically speaking, I’m a writer. I get paid to write words. But here’s something most people don’t know about me: I hate to read. ... You see, I mostly write interface text for apps and websites. It’s a style of writing where brevity beats brilliance, and every character counts. Writing interface text is actually a lot like design—designing words for people who hate to read.
Copywriting is interface design
Thomas Byttebier wrote down some of his thoughts on copywriting.
... copywriting is an often overlooked aspect of UI design. That’s a serious shortcoming, because if you come to think of it: most of an app’s user interface simply is text. Hide the icons, imagery or colors and every app or web site is basically just letters and numbers. There may be some data in there, a significant part of it is UI. It would be stupid not to take excellent care of it.http://thomasbyttebier.be/blog/copywriting-is-interface-design
Be sure to also check out his posts on icons and typography.