Why your product’s voice matters

A competitor analysis workshop on copy, tone, and voice

I used Miro to facilitate the workshop.

UX writing is still a new discipline for many tech organizations. Copy is seen as an easy and quick fix, where anyone with basic writing skills can do it.

The goalRun a workshop to engage the team in the importance of tone and voice, how our copy can affect the view of the product, and how we can all share the ownership of copy.

The challengeSince this is also an introduction to the value of UX writing, I wanted to make a lasting impression. I had 1.5 hours to educate, engage, and not overwhelm the participants.

What businesses fail to realize is that platforms communicate with users using copy. It's not just words on a screen—it's the voice of your product.

Workshop backgroundThe participants consisted of 5 UI designers, 2 UX researchers, our design lead, and the design operations manager.

As I introduced the topic during the workshop, I asked the participants to jot down ideas and thoughts in the form of “How might we…” questions.

These ideas give an insight into the concerns we have as a team surrounding the topic.

During the workshop, we gathered “how might we” questions to collect the groups concerns.

App analyses

All participants analyzed microcopy on the Just Eat Takeaway.com app, paying attention to tone and voice.

Just Eat Takeaway.comAs visual people, we often focus on the design of our app. If it looks good, it must function well, right? This was an opportunity to scrutinize our platform from a copy perspective—ignore the design and focus on just the words. How are we speaking to our consumers?

The participants were asked to spend 5 minutes writing down their thoughts, ideas, and observations about the copy in the Takeaway app.

Their major observations were:

While the copy is direct and functional, it is cold and lacks joy. It doesn’t generate an appetite. One participant described it as “filing taxes”

The copy is inconsistent throughout the user journey

The copy can be more fun and friendly, with increased personalization

Q: Based on your observations, what are the 3 adjectives you'd use to describe the personality of Takeaway?
A: Technical, generic, and functional

Q: What are 3 adjectives you'd use to describe how you think Takeaway should be?
A: Fun, supportive, and welcoming

Slides from first to last: Deliveroo, Wolt, and UberEats. Participants made notes across each platforms’ user journeys.

Analyzing the competitionI asked the group to analyze Deliveroo, Wolt, and UberEats.

Participants were then divided into teams of three to analyze the apps in the same format as the Takeaway analysis: Note down observations and describe each app using 3 adjectives.

Creating personas

Now for the fun part. Since this was a writing workshop, I wanted participants to get creative: I asked them to write personas based on their 3 adjectives.

By creating personas, we can better visualize who is speaking to the target audience.

“Based on your observations and adjectives, what kind of person would your app be?”
The participants had a lot of fun creating their personas and even added images to represent them. While the exercise was delightful, it also showed how every platform used a different voice, even though they may look similar.

The most striking observation was UberEats. One participant said that he assumed that UberEat was targeted towards university students based on the trendy illustrations. But the copy says something else.

Good microcopy is a team effort.

By extending my work to my colleagues, I was able to show them how much copy impacts the tone and voice of the brand.

Since the workshop, designers are excited by opportunities to include conversational and human-centered copy. UX writing is no longer seen as the final step but during the inception of a new vision. I created a presentation deck from the results of this workshop to advocate for:

More user testing and research. By conducting more user tests, interviews, and copy-focused research, we can understand how our consumers perceive the brand.

Earlier collaboration with UX writers. If designers, researchers, and writers collaborate earlier in the process, we can look for inconsistencies, create guidelines, and analyze the copy and content together. We can also add copy improvements to the roadmap and explore UX writing even further within the consumer verticals.

Designers to work with copy in mind. When designers are empowered with UX writing principles, they can create in more innovative ways: using storytelling instead of only visuals, creating screen mockups with different writing styles, and checking copy before every new feature is released.

Conclusion

To keep up within the market, being functional is simply not enough.

Consumers are already experiencing warm service, strong brand identities, and playful copy from competitor apps. This is why microcopy is so important, and why UX writing as a profession has skyrocketed.

Writing may seem simple, but it's part of content design. We can already decide where copy can live in the user flow, wireframes, and design visuals.

A single word can make a big difference in how consumers perceive a product.

Photo by Rick Barrett via Unsplash

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