FOR THE LOVE OF UX, WRITE CLEAR COPY!
The wailing sirens of the closing crossroad gates cut through the brisk morning air as a stampede of commuters herded themselves through the station doors onto a crowded platform. As the blue and yellow metal carriage ground itself to a screeching halt, the bustling flock flowed inward through the carriage doors, like a stream of white water crashing over the rocks.Â
All of the herd but one commuter, a lone student stood idly by like a lost sheep. In a panicked hurry he tore upstream back towards the conductors stall. “I asked for a ticket to Belfast” he bleated. “That’s what you have” groaned the conductor in a depleted tone. He was no stranger to this exact circumstance. “But this says Lanyon Place...”
About a year ago I recall encountering the exact same wave of confusion washing over me when I looked at my ticket. “Lanyon place?” “Where on earth is that?” “I’ve never heard of such a place.” Even though I passed through it’s doors every single day without fail.Â
It’s hard to know exactly what brainwave led to Translink’s decision to name it’s long time titled, “Belfast Central Station” to the obscure “Lanyon Place”. I suppose they thought it sounded more grand, or perhaps they were hoping to reconvene with the cultural roots of the station’s location. But I bet they hadn’t accounted for the loss of time and added frustration of both their passengers as they attempted to flock to work and their staff who would have to herd the surge of lost and confused commuters in the correct direction.
But what does this have to do with UX I hear you mutter internally to yourself? Well if you ever recall landing on a web page or a screen in a site or an app with the intent to perform a certain action, only to be met with ambiguous calls to actions, poor UX copy or an unclear hierarchy. You will fully understand this frustrating confusion. Particularly when it comes to command copy, a button that you’re afraid to click because it say’s something overly generic like “Next” or overly whimsical like “Sounds cool!”.Â
Product designers often fall into these traps when architecting their interfaces, they either keep things too simple and generic or try to inject too much personality that the all direction and instruction is lost. The moral of this story is to always consider your user’s and the use case when writing UX copy. When submitting information to a form consider a button that says “Submit” as opposed to “Continue” or “Next”. When filling out an application for an account on an over 80s dating site perhaps “Finito!” is not the correct choice of words to signify completion or submission.Â
Writing clear, understandable copy is good UX, if you can achieve it you lay a path for your herds of users. Fail to do this and you will be like a shepherd herding their cattle through untracked woodland. Always remember a user interface is a lot like a joke. If you have to explain it, it isn’t any good.Â