Karen Kesler
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Hi David — thanks for reading this and for reaching out. Many people wrestle with the ambiguity around defining and evangelizing a product voice. I have lots of examples that I’ve saved over the years. Here’s one that I think captures the nuances that I wrote about:

I’ll call out a few points about the After example:

  1. It’s shorter, which is always a win with UI text.
  2. Notice the shift from a negative tone about something that’s not right to a statement of value with an actionable response.
  3. There’s no placement of blame for something, either on a device or a person.

Here’s one of our voice principles for Microsoft Windows:

Warm and relaxed: We’re natural. Less formal, more grounded in real, everyday conversations. Occasionally, we’re fun (we know when to celebrate).

And here’s a before/after example of Warm and Relaxed from some UI in Microsoft Edge:

We still find a lot of older error messages and other UI that doesn’t reflect our voice, so we’re always working on making things better in our products.

I’m inspired to write another article to address your last question for suggestions on creating product voice principles, so I’ll get started on that. Thanks again!

Karen Kesler

Director of Content Experiences at Microsoft. I love the magic of words — written, read, spoken, and heard. And yep, my views are my own.

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