Don’t Overlook Your Product’s Content Quality
They go by different names—content strategist, UX writer. You’ll only find them at mature organizations that understand the importance of the whole user experience. Most books and articles describing their roles apply more to web marketing than they do to software. But without the support of a content strategist, your product team might be ill-equipped to deliver a best-in-class software experience.
While content is an afterthought for many product teams, it has the power to make or break the user experience of your company’s software through its impact on quality, brand, and usability.
Poor Content Degrades Product Quality
It goes without saying that spelling errors, incorrect grammar, and inconsistent terminology undermine the value of your product by creating an impression of poor quality. What’s worse, your product team’s lack of attention to detail in this area could lead users to distrust the performance of the software. If customers think your organization hasn’t invested time into polishing the details of your software, why would they want to pay full price for it? How can they trust you haven’t missed details in other, more important areas? Trust and the impression of quality are especially crucial if your product handles sensitive user data like social security numbers or financial information.
Poor Content Leads to Brand Misalignment
When people think about branding, they often first think of logos, colors and other visual treatments. But content is as just as important, and the more intentional we are about the way we speak to our customers, the better we can connect with them.
Your marketing department has probably figured out who their target audience is, as well as the voice and tone that will elicit the desired sentiments and actions from that audience. But the use of appropriate voice and tone doesn’t always carry over to the product team, which is why we end up with unintelligible error messages, an overuse of exclamation points, or robotic instructional text. This creates an experience that feels “off” for the user—you miss an opportunity to connect with them, and you don’t do justice to your brand.
Challenge your product team to consider your brand voice, your users, and the tones that are appropriate for different scenarios. If your brand is casual, the informality of the product language should reflect that. If you’re building a healthcare patient portal, sensitivity of the product language might be a priority. If you’re building a fitness app, there’s an opportunity to encourage your users with playful, positive content. Doing the work to understand your audience and your voice will help you relate better to your users and come across as a more mature brand.
Poor Content Decreases Usability
I’ve conducted user testing sessions in which over half of the identified usability issues related to confusing terminology, and a good number of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design rely on solid content. An immature approach to content can result in the following issues, making products more difficult to use:
Messy navigation - In situations where content hasn’t been considered before identifying a navigation structure, I’ve seen the following issues, all of which make it harder for users to find the information they need:
Nav items that sound like the same thing (“Reports” and “Analytics”), but are in fact different for mysterious reasons. (See the “Consistency and standards” heuristic that states users should not have to wonder whether different words mean the same thing.)
Nav items with different labels that actually mean the same thing (“Home” and “Dashboard”)
Nav labels with internal-facing or overly technical terminology (a violation of the “Match between system and the real world” heuristic that states the system should speak the users’ language)
Poor visibility of system status - Another heuristic is “Visibility of system status,” or helping a user understand what’s going on through appropriate feedback. Yet we’ve all seen cryptic error messages—sometimes so confounding that even Support representatives can’t make sense of them when a user calls in. If you want to improve your UX and save time for Support, enlist a content expert to write human-readable messages that describe the error that is occuring, as well as confirmation messages, progress indicators and other cues that help users learn what’s going on in the UI.
Vague terminology in data visualizations - In scenarios where accuracy is important, as with data visualization software, users demand an especially high degree of clarity from the UI. If graph labels are vague, your users will question their meaning and perhaps even question the integrity of the data. Worse, they may misinterpret the data and make ill-informed business decisions.
Unclear button labels - Similarly, the button label “OK” doesn’t have specific meaning, so users have to guess what buttons with unclear labels actually do. A good UX writer will ensure that the labels on all interactive elements are indicative of the actions the elements perform—i.e. “Save” or “Discard edits.”
Poor scannability - Without a writer’s help, your product’s content could become verbose or lack clear headers, which impairs the user’s ability to scan the content. Research has repeatedly shown that users are more likely to scan content than read it word-for-word, so it’s important to help users better understand your content with clear headers and concise text.
Poor help and documentation - The last of Nielsen’s heuristics states that help and documentation “should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.” While this responsibility sometimes falls on a tech writer as opposed to a content strategist, the help section is often one of the last things a product team considers and frequently gets relegated to the back burner, though it’s an important part of users’ experiences with your product.
In summary, while your product team is likely full of intelligent people, don’t assume they have the chops to plan, write and manage quality content. I’ve seen even the most talented designers and developers struggle with spelling, tone, or creating human-friendly content. This is not a muscle designers and developers are necessarily taught to flex, so consider whether you need to boost the talent on your team with a content expert in order to deliver high-quality experiences.