CrunchMode: Content, Voice, and Value
Growing up, I maintained some outlet for writing — blogs, journals, typewriters, you name it. I felt I had gotten fairly good at stating what was on my mind. Writing about my day was linear. Tangents were contained in their own paragraphs with a nice lead-in sentence from the prior paragraph. At one point, I had a blog for my daily life, another for fiction of all kinds, and somewhere mixed into both were accounts of my dreams and nightmares.
To me it was a relaxing daily exercise. And then I grew up. And in the process I realized the power of perception. Suddenly those short, linear sentences were easy to interpret in any number of unintended ways. Those tangents didn’t seem like the coherent thoughts I thought they were. And those poems? Oh man, leave it to a teenager living in blue collar cities to write some real cringeworthy prose.
So when the homework assignment this week was to write about the content, voice, and value of one of my own posts, I immediately felt that similar sense of dread when adult me looked at my earlier works. For this assignment, I chose to go back to the first assigned project: an app I prototyped on paper that allowed a person to order coffee on-the-go to pick up in person.
The article content focuses solely on the app and its purpose. It introduces you to the app and before you know it, gives you the rigamarole on what to expect with the interactive prototype. The voice seems more like a sales pitch for a product than an opener for UX design dialogue. I feel I was too focussed on getting the reader interested in the platform instead of the ideas that built the interface and interactions, which is a bit disappointing in hindsight.
All that said, value of the article is going to be based on what you find value in. If you’re looking into the mindset of a budding UX designer, you may not find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking into the mindset of a junior marketing manager, well, maybe that intro to CrunchMode can help you assess whether copywriting is a strong suit of mine for a product. If you want to draw your own opinions though, just head to the link below:
