 So, a little bit about me. I love words. I always have. I think they're fun. I enjoy playing with them. And my background is like, I started in customer support on the phone, taking care of our customers. And then we went on to writing knowledge-based articles, you know, and then moved into writing product copy. And that's when I got into UX writing and now UX design. And so let's move on. Okay. So, microcopy. So these are the words that make up a website, like it's in a UI, it's stuff that helps users accomplish a task. These are like button labels and CTAs, error messages, success messages, tooltips, form labels, onboarding, like those little bits of words. It's less of the long form content and more of short strings of words to help users accomplish a task. So now, think of microcopy as the conversation between the company, the website, and the user. So that's back and forth. And the microcopy is our side of the conversation. All right, let's go on. So, let's talk about some horked conversations, this is my word. So this is how I like to describe conversations that just, they did not go well. And it's usually because words are an afterthought, you know, design comes first, the development comes first, just like the idea like all the, you know, we want to do this. And so then it's designed, developed, and then at the end, the developers like, oh, I have this error message, I'm just going to write whatever, you know, they need to, you know, provide that message for the user, but there's no time to ask a writer or care to ask a writer to clean up the words. So now, imagine this exchange happening with two people sitting across from each other. This is where the conversations start to feel weird. You've clearly failed to log in, let me lecture you. And then a whole long lecture of all the things you've done wrong since third grade. And then this red toy ad robot, he made you think you crashed the internet because you forgot to check the terms of service box. Like, oh, that's good. You got to love it. So let's just have a real conversation with our users. But first let's go over some fundamentals. Okay, the three principles of UX writing. Clear, concise, and useful. Clear, you know, take out the jargon, choose the simpler word, or find a word that is more common we use, like a simpler way to say it. Offer context so they know what you're talking about. Be consistent with the names and labels. Like, this is not the time for a thesaurus and choosing flowery, flowy words. No, just if you're going to call it my account, call it my account every single time you refer to it. And then use plain language, I may have already said that. Concise, this is my favorite. I think cutting words is a very fun game. And how you do it is by choosing a more precise word. So if you've got a sentence that has like three words that are capturing that idea. This is when you do grab a thesaurus and look for one word that captures that whole idea. And it can be done with concise also pick the most important topic, the most important content that you want your user to know, put that first. And then edit ruthlessly afterwards. Because it's less important information, you need to be concise. Because in micro copy, UI copy, you don't have a lot of room. So you need your users to have the most important information first. And every word should earn it's place. That's where editing comes into play. Useful, so with micro copy, it has a job. You want the text to help people get to where they want to go, help them achieve their goal, and help them achieve it quickly. You don't want the words to get in the way because they don't want to read a ton to understand what their next action is. So one way you can check for this is asking yourself, is this information relevant right now? Does it help the user get where they're supposed to go next? So with these three principles, they're a good first step. But in order to have that good conversation, you need to know your audience. And this is where you can really start to customize what you're saying and the words you're choosing and whether the humor you choose to use, whether it will actually resonate with your audience or whether they'll be stumped as to what that joke even meant. So your audience, these are users that are interacting with your website. Like, why are they coming to you? Who are they? What are they interested in? What goal are they trying to accomplish with your product, your website? Like, why are they there? So along with this, knowing your audience will also help you choose familiar words and phrasing that they understand and connect with. Let's see, voice, so it's fun. So voice, this is the personality of the brand. And when you're, like every single product and brand has a personality. And the personality is like the words when users are reading them, they kind of hear that voice in their head and it personifies the brand to them. And that's what voice is, it's that personality. One thing to keep in mind with personality is that it doesn't really change much day to day. So as a user is like going through your website or your app, it should, the personality should feel consistent wherever they're at. So they should be able to recognize the personality. If you want to have a personable personality and actually have like a good conversation. I highly recommend using contractions and an active voice because that's how we talk. We use contractions, we don't say you cannot accomplish this thing. Like, we don't, we say, you can't. Or, I mean, you guys don't know what contractions are like, you use them, right? So we're not, we're not robots, we're human. Tone, tone depends on context and it changes depending on your context. This is like when you're talking with your friend and you know that you're delivering a bad news, you soften your tone. And you change your approach for how to deliver that. Same with if you're delivering happy news. You act more excited, you use more cheerful words. This is similar with micro copy, like with an error message. Your user is, they're feeling confused, they're feeling stressed, angry. And so your tone, you want to be gentle and serious and reassuring because you want to meet them where they're at. With a tool tip, which is that helpful text that gives you that information you need. At that state, a user is inquisitive, unsure, but they're interested. They want more information. And so you want to be straightforward and helpful. Just give them the information quick, right to the point. With a product description like marketing, this is when your user is hopeful, they're curious, they're investigating, trying to find a solution. So this is when you want to be informative, helpful, and enticing. That's how you would adjust your tone. Okay, user flow, content first design. I'm pretty passionate about content first design because of the impact it has on the conversation and how it, like the exchange feels. Because as a user progresses through a task flow, I mean conversation needs to flow from the first interaction to the next and to the next. And it needs to sound natural all the way through it. When I've seen this many times, when a design has come first, when I've tried to write words, it feels like putting toothpaste back in the tube. And the conversation that happens feels disjointed. And you're talking to a crazy person because it's out of order. And it doesn't feel natural. But when you put content first design or content first and actually imagine the exchange happening between two people, you can create this more natural flow that has a good conversation. The user can just carry through the task and the flow and accomplish their goal faster and just in a more comfortable natural way. They don't have to pause and think or be like, wait, what, I don't understand. You don't have those type of pauses when you put the content first and you like map out your user flows in a logical way before you even start designs. See, so this is what a conversation can look at. Like set up your site, what's the name of your site? And then the customer types it in, great, what user name would you like to use? Type it in. And then now set your password and then the helpful text. And it's just that back and forth of that sounds friendly, conversational, and it's that back and forth. And to test whether the words that you've chosen for your side of the conversation, whether they would sound good. Read them out loud, because if they sound awkward or robotic, it's going to read awkward and robotic to the user in their mind. So read it out loud and then adjust the words until when you read it out loud, it sounds natural, flows well, and you're not stumbling over words. Also, it really helps to read it out loud to another person or have them read it and see what their response is. But like just test the words on other people. It works. Every writer needs an editor. And okay, so how to get better at this? Like how to improve, whatever. Pay attention to the words and phrases in websites that you like and apps. Like those interactions that you liked, you felt like connected with and you felt like flowed well, make note of them, write them down, and just study the words and the phrases. Next, practice simplifying complex ideas. Because that is something we do a lot in conversations for each other. We explain things, we simplify, we help others understand by simplifying the idea. Whereas I've noticed in websites and we don't do that for each other. We tend to like lots of jargon, lots of technical terms. The developer probably wrote it. But what we can do for each other, simplify those complex ideas. And one way I like to practice this is first, like take something that you're really familiar with and then simplify it and try to get it a good description in 140 characters or less. That you could hand it off to someone else and they would understand that, just the basic idea of what that idea is. It's a good way to do it. And then map out existing user flows. This is like when you sign up for a new account for anything. Just map out the flow, map out their onboarding, and then rewrite it. Or rewrite it and reorder it. Like just try and make the conversation better and improve upon that user flow that you just experienced from whatever website. And it's just a good way to practice. The conversation and reordering user flows into a more logical order of things. That makes sense. Yeah, actually sometimes I will write out a conversation. And I'll have them be the customer and I'll be the company and we'll write it out. It works similar to storyboards, but sticky notes help really well for being able to rearrange quickly. So yeah, it's a good way to do it. Okay, inclusion. We can just talk human until the zombie apocalypse strikes. You know what happens. Any questions? Concerns? It doesn't. So I actually, I have some compassion for the developers that are being forced to write these messaging, like the error messages at the end. Because I mean, that's not their job and it comes from poor planning. But they're doing their best and they're at least finishing the job. But you're right, that the error code somewhere else. Yeah, I love 404 pages. Okay, 404 pages, I feel like those are a fun opportunity to show the brand's personality and you have to understand with personality, if you've chosen to have a more formal approach, then you can't have humor in the 404 pages. But I like having humor there. I do think it is important for 404 pages to give the user a suggestion, like you couldn't find what you were looking for, would you like to go back to the homepage? Or just something, some sort of direction on what they can do next. Or a suggestion of where they could look to find it, whatever they were looking for. That's my suggestion. Yeah, no, I think they're really entertaining. Yeah, cuz I really like to imagine it being in person. Like Realtor website, there's one I found where like, okay, imagine this. So you immediately get this newsletter pop up where it's like sign up for my newsletter and you're like, okay, I just wanna look for a house. I don't know you, no thanks. And then, so the way I imagine that is you walk into a Realtor's office and then he immediately runs up to you and he's like, just close to your face. Can I be a Realtor? And you're like, dude, back off, I have, no. And that's how I feel like most of those newsletter pop ups come across. But then you also get into that same Realtor website. Like, okay, just say no thanks. And get into the website and it's already showing you listings. Like, I haven't told you what I want. And so I imagine that as the Realtor being like, look at all these things I need to sell, do you want one? You're like, well, no, I actually want a house in this city. So again, no thanks. And so then you get to the search and you know on those Realtor websites are like listing type, bedrooms, washing machine, like they list like every single little detail. And it feels like you're just being peppered with questions. You're just like, okay. And then you move your cursor to click out and you get another pop up of like, hey, sign up for my newsletter. Can I be a Realtor here? My gosh, no. So like that interaction, like imagining it in person just makes me laugh. So yeah, any other questions? Yeah, Google. Actually, I do like Google a lot. Okay, resources for what specifically? Okay, question. Do you need to be collaborative with it or are you doing it on your own? Okay, one I really like is real-time board. Because I mean, you can map stuff out real quick, you can get the sticky notes up and then you can invite people to join and help you sort it out, that kind of thing. I do really like Google Docs for collaboration as well. For user flows, another good one is Whimsical for fast like mapping. It's whimsical.co, I believe. That one is free for certain number of boards. But you can like map really, really fast and then rearrange easily as well. I'll say those. Yeah, thanks. Yes, absolutely. It doesn't have to be final copy. Like content-first design is those content ideas in place. And honestly, I feel like the developer should have a role in that. Because they can tell you whether that's possible or not or you're going to make it more complicated, especially because like, if the developer comes in and says, well, yeah, we can do that, but we have to do it this way, it can very quickly change how that conversation comes across because then you have to write more copy to explain the weird little change. But if you bring in a developer in these conversations when you're first like working out the ideas and the content, skip a lot of problems. But with the content-first design, if you can get those ideas of like what the exchange needs to happen. So like with this example, this one. The ideas were just, okay, we need to ask them the name of their site. That's the information we need. The other thing is we want another username so they can create that password. There was more to this flow. This is an example flow that I wrote, but when I wrote it originally, there were quite a few screens. But all I did was just get the basic ideas of like what information I'd be asking for. And then imagining what would be coming back from the user. And also by imagining what could be coming back, you can also identify situations where they might return something unexpected. And that will trigger an error, which is still part of the conversation. Like the conversations can ongoing as the whole time they're interacting with your website, but the final copy was written at the end when the front end developer was ready to put it in. But all the ideas were there so that back end development could get those pieces in place and knew what to expect. And then that gave me time to actually finalize and polish and choose the right words. Does that answer your question? Okay. Any other questions? I think chatbots are super interesting. I would love to write the responses for a chatbot. Let me just be super cool on. I do think they definitely have a place. I think they're still, they are still very new. And so, I mean, the bot has to be programmed to sound natural and to like understand all the different varieties of input they can get and interpret it as, oh, they mean this so they can return the right answer. I think they can replace like some types of things, but until like machine learning is like improved and we've got it like more mainstream and like use more. I think until then, chatbots are going to sound like a bot. Unless you've got a really good developer and writer working on it. Yeah. I do think like the Google assistant and Alexa, I have more experience with the Google assistant because we have one of those at home. I have found it very interesting to see what type of responses are returned and the response or doesn't know. And I feel like the Google assistant does a pretty decent job of sounding human and natural and conversational. And it's kind of creepy sometimes, but I don't have that skill set. The brother does and I'd be able to get him to, is that similar to the Alexa skills that you can. All right, I'm doing it. Any other questions? It's fun talking to you guys.