Writing for all
Two UX writing principles can help create more usable products
For the nearly 60 million Americans who work at small businesses, there’s a dizzying number of confusing tasks to do, from running payroll to finding an affordable healthcare plan.
Because small businesses come from a huge range of industries, places, and backgrounds, helping our customers means designing for a similarly huge range of situations. When we design at Gusto, our language and information architecture have to meet all of these people where they are… which, most of the time, is a long way away from the language of IRS publications and state laws.
Software can automate a lot of those pesky little tasks — and for the rest, UX writers can translate confusing requirements into easy steps. Writers have a unique set of skills: they can read arcane information, figure out what’s going on, discern what’s most important, and explain it all in simple language.
We’re building a UX writing program in this spirit. We call it writing for all: if our product’s language doesn’t work for 100% of the people who use it, it’s not good enough. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’ve found that two principles help guide us toward a more accessible, equitable, and usable product.
Flourishes are barriers.
Pursuing an exciting turn of phrase can be important in literature, but it often gets in the way of good UX writing. When it does, it hurts the customers you’re trying to serve.
As the UK’s Government Digital Service writes: “the main purpose of GOV.UK is to provide information — there’s no excuse for putting unnecessarily complicated writing in the way of people’s understanding.” In tech, “unnecessarily complicated writing” isn’t just big words and confusing grammar — it’s also overly enthusiastic attempts to make a product feel “human.”
UX writers are all too familiar with some version of this conversation:
Teammate: The user just finished a short flow. Can we create a confirmation screen that says: “AMAZING, Rockstar! You’re an unbridled force of nature!”
Writer: We might tone that down a bit.
Teammate: But we need some fun, delightful attitude! It should be magical!
Writer: Okay, but they just clicked two buttons, and a lot of people might want to keep moving with their day.
Teammate: [in a silent way, or muttered] Why are writers such kill-joys?
That’s exaggerated, of course, but not much.
We’re thoughtful about our tone at Gusto, especially when we’re operating in stressful, highly regulated spaces like healthcare and taxes. We’re diligent about the enthusiasm of our voice, because the people who use our product often just need to get something done and move on. We owe it to them to meet them in that headspace, not our own.
If you’re ever fighting to tone things down, don’t be afraid to tell your co-worker that choosing the right words isn’t just a matter of taste, vibe, or “feel”: astute word choice helps more kinds of people use and enjoy your product. Here are just a few examples of what you gain by losing all of those unnecessary flourishes:
- The product will likely be easier to use for users of all ages. When tech companies make highly stylized or effusive language choices, they often privilege the way that millennials tend to think and talk about the world, often to the detriment of both younger and older people.
- The product will respect people’s time and effort with acknowledgement that’s appropriate to what they’ve actually done, rather than pander with gratuitous praise.
- The product won’t alienate already vulnerable people. You can imagine why many people might be turned off by being called an “unbridled force of nature” or “rockstar” by an app. Someone living with depression, for instance, might not want to be bombarded with this kind of stuff throughout your product, and rightfully so.
- Other working writers won’t roll their eyes at your hokey catch-phrase. This benefit shouldn’t be underestimated.
In short, never satiate the aesthetic whims of your team at the expense of users’ trust.
Precision is egalitarian.
Once the affectations are gone, it’s time to craft precise and accurate language. Writing for a wide audience means that information has to be relevant and readable — it doesn’t mean that everything has to be broad and ambiguous.
A lot of companies insist on lowering the reading level of their product’s language as much as possible: the easier it is to read, the more people can read it. This approach, though it’s often admirable, neglects that the most readable sentence isn’t always the most informative, and the simplest way of writing something isn’t always the best way to help your users complete a task.
Imagine filling out a few screens, all of which ask for sensitive information about you, your medical history, and your healthcare plan. At the end, which message would you rather read?
- “Cool — all done!”
- “Thanks for the information. We’ve successfully sent it to your employer and insurance carrier. Feel free to close this window.”
Option 1 sacrifices clarity and thoroughness for a quick, easy comment. It couldn’t be written more simply.
Option 2 gives you reassuring information in a straightforward way.
Precise articulations might not always be the absolute easiest to read, but they often give users the most relevant guidance. They work for more people because they’re unambiguous: they don’t rely on concepts that they don’t explain, and they don’t gesture toward context that the user may or may not have.
The more ambiguity that you leave in your product’s voice, the more you’re relying on people to share the cultural, educational, and psychological context of you and your team — and your users will have to share a lot of that context to figure out the details that you don’t provide. Rather than explaining important information, you’re assuming that people will just know what you mean. Assuming that level of cultural similarity is just another barrier to entry, and it’s why imprecise language ensures that your users will more closely resemble your team.
When language is precise, people can understand and then act on it as they see fit, however surprising that action may be to you.
Whether you’re a professional UX writer, a product designer, or something else entirely, we’re all lucky to work with this incredible thing called language, which lets us share ideas between brains. Language in tech products should do the same thing: allow us to share ideas and knowledge as broadly as possible. This is how we’re writing for all at Gusto.
