After completing an exercise in class where I explored UX writing, I felt there were improvements I could make in my UX writing as I appreciate how important a skill it is and is something I want to develop my abilities in. To explore UX writing further, I used NN/g’s UX Writing Study Guide to learn more about the topic and understand it further.
An important part of understanding good UX Writing is to first understand how users read. The widely accepted pattern is the “F Pattern”, where users read left to right at the top of the page, then less on left to right partially down the page, then move vertically down while scanning the left side. This was an interesting concept to me as it’s something I feel I could understand how I myself do it when reading about the pattern. This relates back to what I looked at in a previous blog about how little users actually read. This seems to be a natural pattern that relates to how we are taught to read, but I found an article from NN/g that claimed that we’re at a point in the design where we shouldn’t just accept the user will scan in the F pattern and should try to prevent this type of scanning through good content design.
The article suggests a number of ways in which the design of content can be used to combat the F Pattern but largely boils down to creating shorter, more organised sets of content. Shortening and organising content is an effective way of getting users to the content they want to see quicker, as seen in sites like GOV.uk, and is important to consider as it affects how content has to be written. This has helped me understand the importance of UX Writing as understanding the best way to deliver content through UX Writing makes content far more easily accessible and decreases the amount of scanning and searching users have to do.
F-Shaped Pattern of Reading on the Web: Misunderstood, But Still Relevant (Even on Mobile)
This was another useful article I found relating to the fundamental factors in UX writing. The first, is the idea of the legibility of content. This is something I’m already familiar with and fairly confident in, as it relates to the type, whether that be the font, size, or spacing etc. It’s the most important and fundamental aspect of UX Writing and always needs to be considered.
The second factor, is readability, which is complexity and sentence structure of the content. This is also obviously incredibly important, but is something I probably consider less. What was a really interesting concept for me was the idea that the best language to use will always be the simplest. Readability should be treated like universal design, where despite the purpose or users, it’s always best practice to design for everyone. Even if the language feels to simple for what you’re writing for, having it written in clear, easy to understand language is only going to help users, rather than exclude users.
The last fundamental factor is comprehension, which is how the users interpret the writing. This again was interesting to me, as there has to balance of short content that also explains what it needs to. The inverted pyramid can help with comprehension, by revealing the final point before giving the explanation. Keeping the explanation for after the conclusion makes for a better user experience, as it makes it that the longer content only needs to be read by those who need it, as some users may not need to read it. Breaking content up like this to improve comprehension is something really important for me to consider, as it’s something I found difficult during the class UX Writing exercises.
Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words
Plain Language For Everyone, Even Experts (Video)
Tone of voice for content is another important thing to consider in UX Writing. When a user interacts with a system, it’s an unnatural way to interact due to it being man to machine, so considering tone of voice can help to humanise the system for users. There has to be a balance between a system sounding human while still keeping a direct and easy to understand style of content. What I thought was most interesting about this is how using tone of voice can help to make system errors or problems be less alarming to users. I think finding that balance between keeping a system human and still being direct is really interesting and something I’ll consider in my projects more, as I feel when working on projects I don’t often consider things like error messages.
The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice in UX Writing (Video)