Ban your design team from using lorem ipsum
Imagine a mobile app or a website with no words. You’d see a search bar but you wouldn’t know what to search for. You’d see a button but you wouldn’t know what would happen if you clicked it.
Perhaps “no words” is a bit of a stretch. Imagine a mobile app or a website with poorly written copy. You see an error message that says your payment didn’t go through, but you don’t know why and you’re stuck. Or you see a lot of text on a dialog box and you just ignore it. Turns out that the dialog box said that your subscription will renew in a week and now you’re annoyed because you’ve paid for a product that you didn’t want to use.
Words matter. They tell your users what they need to do, what has gone wrong and how to fix the problem. From the title of a page to the button copy to an FAQ, it all adds up to how a user engages with and experiences your product.
And UX writing isn’t something that should come after design. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s a wireframe, a low-fidelity design or a high-fidelity design, there have to be real words on the interface. There should be no place for “lorem ipsum” in designs.
We’ve documented our best practices for UX copy in Obvious University. You'll find guidelines on how to write placeholder copy, loading states and success messages. It's a great place to start:
🖊️ How to write well
📝 How to write phrases
📘How to write messages
Here is some of our favourite writing on UX writing:
Until next time!