Content Designers and the Art of Undervaluation
It’s easy to undervalue content when it’s created quickly…
Recently, I heard a well-known Picasso anecdote:
A woman approached Picasso in a restaurant, and begged him to sketch something on a napkin.
“I’d love to own an original Picasso!” she exclaimed.
He complied, grabbed a napkin, and scribbled something. “That’ll be $10,000.”
“What?” she gasped. “But… that only took you thirty seconds!”
“No,” Picasso replied, “that took me forty years.”
As Designers, sometimes we can spend a long time thinking before crafting, and other times we can produce something relatively quickly.
Does that make the content that was created quickly less valuable?
The Picasso anecdote helped me reflect on how I’ve undervalued the micro-copy I create. As a Content Designer at Atlassian, my role includes creating micro-copy for Jira such as button labels and error messages.
Until now, my perception has been: “If it’s quick to create, it must be fairly worthless.”
Right? Wrong!
Good micro-copy can make or break a user’s experience. It’s easy to write something that looks good but actually makes life harder for the user. For example, a confirmation screen that asks a user whether or not they want to cancel a data export:
Cancel export?
Are you sure you want to cancel the current export? It may take a few minutes to terminate the process.
What would you label the confirmation button?
Typically, it would reaffirm the action: Cancel. But then, what would the “Wait, go back, I’ve changed my mind” button be labeled? Often, that type of button is labeled Cancel.
In this scenario, we’d have two Cancel buttons side-by-side:
- one to confirm the action to cancel the export, and
- one to cancel the cancellation.
Content conundrums such as this one demonstrate that crafting content — even short blink-and-you’ll-miss-it micro-copy like a single-word CTA (call to action) — isn’t simple.
It takes practice to create something that’s succinct and delivers the right message to the right type of audience at the right moment in time.
And when you’ve spent years honing the craft of content creation, running through your internal list of who-what-where-when-why* (see below) can happen like that (finger-snap).
So, while it can sometimes be a quick process to create micro-copy (button label), there might be years of practice and application backing it up.
*The internal list of ‘who-what-where-when-why’ … a.k.a. a peek inside a Content Designer’s thought process
For every content task that comes my way, I explore a list of questions:
- Who is reading this copy? How much knowledge do we expect them to already have? How much detail do we need to go into?
- What are we hoping this copy will prompt them to do? What are we trying to teach them?
- Where is this going to appear? What tone of voice does this require — super technical, or a bit more friendly? Is it appearing on a new screen (thereby requiring a heading, body copy, and CTA)?
- When does a user access this content? What journey have they been on before they arrive here? Are we expecting them to spend a long time here, or will it frustrate them to be presented with multiple options?
- Why are we presenting users with this copy? Is the user expecting something else at this stage? If so, how can we mitigate their potential frustration/disappointment/confusion? Is there a better solution?
After asking a Software Developer some background questions for an error message I was writing, he remarked: “Very cool seeing how much thought goes into this!”
When done well, micro-copy allows the user to maintain full acceleration. When done poorly, it can stop them in their tracks. And just because a piece of micro-copy might have taken minutes to create, rather than hours, that doesn’t mean it’s less valuable.
So stop undervaluing your micro-copy. Go ahead and be proud of it.
