The life cycle of a word at StashAway
🐣 Every day, new words are born at StashAway.
Some words are short, and some are long.
Some may be weak, and others strong.
Some tell a story, some sing a song,
Some delight when you’re right;
Some guide when you’re wrong.
And yet some never see daylight before their swan song.
🏥 The labour and delivery room — Figma
Here, the journey of a word begins. Miracles and magic happen as new words are birthed into life. The prior UX research and user insights have carried the necessary designs to term. It’s all hands on deck as designers, product managers, and stakeholders operate on the initial flows and prototype.
We get to work, and help make sure the words take shape as they should. New products need descriptions; titles need creative hooks; buttons should say Continue; etc. Every word should be useful, concise, clear, and delightful.
We start by iterating and brainstorming options. Many of these don’t make it, but that’s ok, they go on to live beautiful lives in parallel universes. Here are examples of a mix-and-match exercise with various copy iterations:
🌱 How words grow and develop — a case study
Some words are more mysterious. Do you know what ESG or Crypto ETFs are? If you do, good for you – because not every investor does. An example of a product where copywriting was essential in providing jargon-free information was our ESG portfolio.
Let’s take a closer look at it for a bit. When we wanted to launch the portfolio, we already had this guy:
Well, so what? Now, the issue was that the E in ESG stood for Environment, and through research, we knew that some users would confuse the two portfolios. We couldn’t go with Socially-Responsible Investing (a similar industry term) either, because SRI was already StashAway Risk Index.
So in the end, we went with Responsible Investing, paired with ample explanation and guides — slightly wordy, but it worked! We also made sure to have an introduction page that made clear distinctions between the two:
🐤 Words of a feather, flock together
There’s a whole zoo of other types of words that are evolved to do their own thing, such as buttons, toggles, CTAs (calls-to-action), tooltips, descriptions, warnings, success screens, instructions, graphs, emails, push notifications, release notes, and so on. Some are invisible copy, meant to be clear, concise, and move the user along a flow effortlessly.
Some are more fun and creative, such as our release notes:
Made some UI improvements. In other words, we made it more good-looking, just like you. Also fixed some bugs. Not that there were any bugs before of course, they were just features. But regardless, there are fewer bugs now.
Or this one, which feels pretty fun too (choose your adventure):
🦸🏻♂️ Words with special powers: nudges, heuristics, and A/B testing
All words are equal, but some are more equal than others. Where possible, we run tests such as highlighter tests, the 5-second test, or A/B comparisons to test user understanding and pick the choicest words.
Other times, we gently nudge users towards certain behaviours, which are the specialty of certain phrases that, for instance:
- Relax the user = “You can always change this later.”
- Ease the user= “Go on and give it a try — you’re not obligated to invest.”
- Meant to be at the front = Verbs
- Are kinda clickbait-y = “3 reasons why you should dollar-cost average”
- Use the availability heuristic = “Promo until...”
- Have a bandwagon effect = “Nearly half of Singaporeans use digital financial tools such as StashAway.”
🔌 It’s alive… it’s alive!
The final stage in a word’s life is to make it onto the screen — once they’re there, they are read by hundreds of thousands of users around the world!
And there you have it! A very short story of the journey of a word at StashAway :)
