What is Microcopy?

Welcome to week six of my review of the CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree! Over four weeks I have been covering my progress in this online course as part of CXL’s scholarship program. You can check out my review on my first four weeks on the course here: 1, 2, 3 & 4

This is what microcopy looks like:

It’s the label on a form field, a tiny piece of instructional text, error messages or the words on a button. The goal of microcopy is to either instruct users or alleviate their concerns (reduce friction).

Picking the right words removes ambiguity and increases confidence in an interface — a key component of conversion. Every word we use has meaning, purpose, and impact. This is the basis for the importance of microcopies, those small text fragments that can radically alter the user experience.

Effective microcopy does these 3 things well:

Keep these 4 rules in mind at all times:

In this video, three women working as UX Writers at Google explain the importance these small text fragments have. They show us how to improve an error message in the clip below:

You've just created the best user experience ever. You had the idea. You sketched it out. You started to build it. Except you’re already in trouble because you’ve forgotten something: the copy. Specifically, the microscopy. Microcopy is the text we don’t talk about very often. It’s the label on a form field, a tiny piece of instructional text, or the words on a button. It’s the little text that can make or break your user experience.

If you think you’ve built the best user experience but didn’t make sure the microcopy was spot on, then you haven’t built the best user experience.

I’m willing to bet that your experience is plastered with internal terminology, especially your labels and navigation. Every company has its own language, which often sneaks onto the website when we’re not careful.

Because brevity is essential on the Web, most of us tend to truncate everything — particularly labels. Labels are great for design. They organize and keep tidy essential parts of a UI, such as navigation and forms.

I’ve heard this too many times when the UX falls short, and I hate it. If there’s a problem with the design, then fix the design. The best experiences have minimal copy because they’re intuitive. When designing the UX and you find yourself writing a sentence or two to help the user take an action, step back.

There are multiple definitions of a “branding moment.” When we talk about copy in a UX, I define it as a moment when you purposefully inject your brand’s tone and voice into what would normally be a straightforward user interaction.

The hot saying right now is “Content is king.” Native advertising, or the integration of relevant content into a natural experience for the purpose of acquisition, is becoming a core offering of many agencies and has spawned a few popular startups.

There are 2 ways to identify this:

Look at every main interaction point on your site — buttons, forms, error messages, menus, sub-menus, links, hovers.

What would improve clarity? Help you set better explanations? Give better instructions?

Examples of microcopy include:

Unsurprisingly given the nature of its product, Grammarly uses concise and descriptive homepage copy to guide users along.

It could have easily kept its button at ‘Add to Chrome’, however, the extra ‘It’s free’ immediately reassures and creates urgency.

MailChimp also gives users extra tips on how to create a password, this time using a real-time component.

As the user enters a new password, the bold bullet-points are greyed out as each required element is completed (i.e. one uppercase or one special character). This is extremely helpful and yet subtle at the same time.

See you next week.

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