Microcopy for complex products: Part 2/3
In Microcopy for complex products: Part 1/3 I wrote about learning your product in order to write it successfully. Start with learning but at a certain point, start teaching, too. Keep an eye out for opportunities to teach, like when onboarding new recruits to your team and weaving product-specific examples in to talks you give in or outside of the company, to people who don’t interact with the product as intimately as you do every day. Identify your next opportunity and go for it!
Teach
Like we said, step 2 is to teach the complexity you just learned. If you can’t teach it, you didn’t really learn it. And if you did learn it, teaching it will make it stick even better.
Teach to learn
Repeating what you’ve learned in your own words is hands down the best way to a) validate that you really do get it, and b) increase the chances you’ll remember it. If you don’t take those extra steps to help the information sink in, there wasn’t much of a point in learning it in the first place.
Another benefit from teaching will come from the questions you’ll get. When you know the answers, you’ll gain confidence and confidence that you know what you’re doing is a good thing. When you don’t know the answers, you’ll have the catalyst to go research the answers, enriching your understanding even further.
In addition to questions, you’ll get unsolicited comments — if you’re working in a good company, your colleagues will always have opinions. Some of these comments will be completely off, exposing a concept you haven’t explained well enough. Work with that comment to better clarify the point until the commenter understands why their comment was off. Other comments will be spot on and may improve your presentation for next time, or even better, be the seed that sprouts real change in the product itself. Starting discussion is good! The more people you teach, the more people can participate in the conversation, contribute their perspective, and the product will benefit.
Teach a lot
Teach as often as you can. This will force you to stay up-to-date — tech moves fast and complex, cutting-edge tech moves even faster. Just because you got it right once, doesn’t mean your grasp on the complex tech you need to communicate is still accurate. Staying updated is important to you and to the company. It’s everyone’s job — especially executives and product managers — and you should own it, too.
Teaching often also forces you to seek out diverse audiences. Each audience will require you to tweak the scope and angle of your explanations. (Always meet the user where they are.) Having to adjust your presentation each time will deepen and broaden your own understanding of the complexities.
Isolate
Learning and teaching — which is really learning on the next level — is important for everyone who works on a complex product. But the UX writer has to take the next step and distill the information to communicate to the users. Just as important as deciding what to say, is deciding what not to. One of the worst thing you can do when writing for complex products is tell the user everything you’ve learned and taught about the tech behind the UI. No. Don’t do that.
Organize the information
Isolate the information the user needs and define when and in what context they need it. Outline the basic information that must be included in order to use and benefit from the product at all. Then outline the rest of the information. Prioritize it by both how important it is to selling and using the product. Categorize concepts by whether they needs to be communicated throughout the product, or if they are only relevant in specific flows or to specific users.
Shape your presentation
You’ve decided what information actually needs to be presented and where — but how?
First of all, always remember to respect the user; the user base for complex products tend to be somewhat more sophisticated than average users of simple products. Think about what is considered common knowledge in their world as you define what information you’ll communicate and how.
At the same time, remember that “common knowledge” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. User test the kishkas out of your copy ; better to be inclusive than risk dropoff because potential users had no idea what you’re talking about. More knowledgable users won’t mind the more basic explanations if they don’t get in their way or sound patronizing.
Make sure to be completely accurate or this more basic messaging will make you particularly vulnerable to attacks on your credibility by your power users. Take the extra time to do the research and get it right. You don’t need to be an expert to write the right things — you need to foster and leverage fluid communication with the experts.
Step 2 is to learn and step 3 is to isolate the right stuff. Stay tuned for the part where we actually put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard)…
