Day 24 – Microcopy Writing in UX & Understanding User Emotions

Foreign. The most powerful design element is not about designing a color or button. It's the word you choose. Your copy in UX decides whether your user is going to trust you or completely ignore you. How many of you don't know this? This is exactly called the skill of writing micro copies for your UX design which is emotionally going influence your user. Welcome guys. This is Jagadeesh from Design for Change. Thank you for staying tuning. Here we are in the week four of endocrine system and I'm very interested to teach design through the parts of human body. And we've been taken as a challenge to complete this before this December 31, 2025. Just in case if you're watching little later or maybe something, you have to know that every year we do little innovation in our topic and content creation. Last year we did something like 100 days of 100 skills. This time we are splitting it our human body and creating 100 topics of design which easily people can able to learn concepts and design. Okay, so we've been in this week four of endocrine system. What does mean by endocrine system? This is a network of gland that produces and releases hormones. Exactly. The chemical messengers that functions across our body to include to make sure everything is properly happening. Like let's say metabolism, like let's say reproduction. Like, let's say growth hormone, everything. Like let's say when you take parathyroid adrenaline glands, pancreas, ovaries in females, testates and males. So all these things are the part of the endocrine system. The point what I wanted to make you is endocrine system is very important in that particular endocrine. In the last day 22 we saw about triggers of UX. In the 23 we saw behavioral and nudges in with respect to UX. Today we are going to see microcopy. 74% of the user trust your brand only with the human like copy available, not with the chatgpt sentences. This is by Nielsen Norman Group. By 2024, 68% of your user drop off during your onboarding due to robotic language. People will think that this is actually something which is what you call not connecting with them in a human to human way. Your words can make either a trigger, a dopamine or a cortisol. Depends on the way in which you keep it. Because your brain reads tonality before the meaning comes into it. The point is your words are your design hormones. The more and more you're able to understand it, you will be able to create a Better microcopy for your ux. Don't ask that somebody else will come and create it. You as a designer knows the product, you know your user, you know the empathy better. And you have to create the user experience through writing a proper microcopy. In this video I'm going to be telling you about the concept of what is microcopy? What are the background and the importance of it and the mistakes and the case study and the neuroscience behind it. With that, let's jump into this topic. Welcome guys. Welcome, welcome. So what does mean by microcopy? Microcopy is equal to smaller pieces of text, which makes the user guide through this entire process of the user, of application or use of website or anything. It includes buttons, tooltips, labels, error states, text, caution alerts, everything. It also builds confidence, clarity and emotional rhythm. Microcopy is equal to invisible UX architecture of emotions. This is a very, very important point which I wanted to highlight because many users, they are completely reading out the text, Many designers are creating that text. But really what is happening is you are constructing the architecture of your product inside the user mind, which is going to drive them back again and again to your product and service. Many brands have created beautiful products, but they don't understand this invisible user experience element which puts them on a big disparity towards getting into it. Okay, so you need to understand this. Every word acts like a neurotransmitter, comfort or stress. So this the main concept of UX microcopy, What are the background of it? This was actually born with web usability evolution in 2000s, like let's say Nielsen and Norman groups and UX writers defined this microcopy as an emotional glue to the user. This is very important. See, microcopy has been prevalently available in the terminology of marketing. And when you write email copies, when you write copywriting for your sales letter, copywriting for your emails for your customers, or a newsletter. So this is a very different wordings and terminology. But in UX you need to create an exact microcopy for your user, how he's going to go through your product or application or website or anything, what you're building. This evolved from marketing to and as I rightly mentioned and Apple and Airbnb first to adopt this personality in the copy of their user guides. You can read this book called don't make me think. Steve Kruger emphasized this is called clarity is care. This is how you connect your user in an emotional way. In the world of AI, which is polarizing the technology and the people and the human values and everything which is. Which is actually, I'm not saying it's polarizing, I'm saying it. It's been seen from a very different perspective in the last five to 10 years because of the technology acceleration on the AI happened. But how do you integrate the humans? How do you make the human values connect back to the humanity? This is one such way you can able to do it without using much of ChatGPT to create microcopy for your product. So the importance of it is of course you must have known it. It builds emotional safety, it lowers cognitive load, it defines brand tonality and voice is equal to identity and prevents user anxiety during fictional moments. More important, it encourages the user to complete certain critical task. See, let's say if your application is very crucial and the user is not aligning to your requirement, how do you make the user positively nudge and make him segregate a chemical inside a body to do it? Your microcopy can do it. Think about it. This reinforces a dopamine release through successful messaging. So you need to get this point. What are the categories of microcopies? 1 is Action Text, like let's say buttons, call to action, navigations for signages. Next is instructional level, like let's say when you are giving an alert, when you're giving a caution, when you're giving a tips, tools, placeholders and all. Third is system feedback, like let's say if something else is happening, you need to confirm the user. You need to provide the confirmation success message error message for that it's a system feedback. Next is emotional moments when you're celebrating reward system onboarding, congratulation, appreciating like let's say leaderboard and all. Next is preventive text. This is like warning, failure, safe and other things. So it's a very simple elements. Action text, instructional text, system feedback, emotional moments and preventive text. When you take care of this five, you tend to understand the microcopy even more better away. What are the neuroscience backing? Of course you must have got the point. Now this exactly hits the dopamine of the user positive tonality. Hey, you did it. Congratulations. Oxytocin. This builds a positive connection and the trust is built for a brand. We got your back. We'll support you, we'll help you, we'll lend you. We are hearing your feedbacks. Serotonin, it calms your user to make sure the reassurance is happening and everything is safe. It's very important. Cortisol levels actually gets reduced triggered by alarming copy like error message and all. So the goal is to make hormones balanced, balance what a human body does. Why? It segregates different, different hormone. This is to keep your body in a balanced state. Dr. Demartini always says that our every cell in the body, our every parts in the body, our every micro element, whatever you are seeing in this world or even your body or anything, it is always having a goal to make it neutral and normal. When you have a cut in your hand, immediately the cells next to your body tends to segregate multiple level of inflammation like let's say the different hormones. It alerts you that your pain is happening, to shout out or maybe to hold your hand like this. Or maybe it will also create lot of chemicals inside your body to make sure that the wound is getting healed to come back to the normal. Are you getting it? So your design, your microcopy, your call to action, your buttons and text and everything have to make your user calm down. If you understand this one element, the way in which you're going to see designs is going to completely flip over. You're going to create a very, very meaningful product where customers are going to love it. They don't even know why are they loving it because you have emotionally touched them. This is exactly called the emotional design. So the goal is to balance this. Because this is a law of nature. You need to understand this. So how to exactly do it? Jagdish? There are three steps to do it, guys. First is tone mapping. You can define the emotion per interaction, what your users are exactly going through. Can you make it like let's say you can celebrate the success. You can highlight the error. You can make the user wait. That's a step one based on the tonality. Step two, Write for feelings. Like let's say you have to test your emotion before the grammatical errors and everything properly are available or not. Replace all these technical words with a simple language. Keep everything in one or two words or maximum in the one line or sentences or 12 words. That will be really great. Step three, visual sync. Pair all the copy tone with colors and emotion. Like let's say if it has to be color pairing done, if it has to be a font pairing done, if it has to be a complementary and split colors. Make sure the colors, typeface, spacing, everything should be having a proper visual synchronization for it. Synchronization towards it. If you're not able to take care of tonality writing for the feeling and visual sync, your application will go into despair and you will never know why your product is failing. People will just take that uninstall. If you ask them why they won't tell. Do you think they will tell? Cortisol is not wrong. Correctly segregated by my body. Your application has not brought me exactly the dopamine hit. Do you think user is going to talk like that? First of all, designer itself doesn't understand or maybe get the concept behind it. So nobody tells this but you need to understand. Let's say if you're watching this video, you're super lucky. You're getting the super information what I'm giving you. Because this is going to change the way in which you're going to approach your application or the product design or even physical interaction design or anything. Think about it. So you can able to read this thing called Duolingo, Paypal, Apple, Airbnb, Gmail. Like let's say in Duolingo you get to see learning increased by 20 percentage. Why? Because it's bit by bit pieces of learning. You can see this PayPal we are processing your payment securely. It reduces the anxiety of the user up to 28% during checkout. Apple friendly onboarding text humanizes the setup process. Have you seen when you when you switch on your iPad or when you switch on your when your iPhone it says like hola. It's like vanakam like let's say in your own native language it says that humanized words. So Airbnb, you're one step closer to your next adventure. Improved completion by 90% See and Gmail undo send microcopy built instant trust reduces regret related due to drop offs this a very big problem in Gmail system but it has been taken care. So the point here is you can use ChatGPT. You can bring some kind of emotional writing words from here, but make sure you read that first. Any AI tools will work Grammarly Hemingway app or maybe you can use many Figma plugins to rewrite everything like a microcopy. But ultimately you need to understand and read it in a manual way. Emotional mapping from from your voice feedback is one of the very important thing which you can take it back to the user and again create a meaningful microcopy for your user. So you can do a multiple level of testing to understand it. Or you can also design a product and test it out with your nearest user whom you have. But ultimately you need to get the feel of what the user is requiring then and only the microcopy is really really working for you. Or else you end up making mistakes. You know what mistakes you'll be doing. You'll be over friendly tone. You'll be giving robotic phrases. You'll be inconsistent, you'll be overwriting. You'll be humor. In the wrong moment, you will not be able to connect with your user emotionally. Imagine when you go and propose a girl. When you go and talk in a relationship with wrong usage of words and the wrong timing, what happens? It breaks out. So you need to understand this. What is the UX writing pyramid? First is clarity. Again, this is not becoming like a grammatical session. But you have to take care of how the pyramid works for your product. But I'm just giving you a general perspective. Clarity is very important. Understood in one glance. Second, empathy. Have you understood your user or not? Purpose. This drives your user forward. Next, brevity. Lesser text and faster emotion. This is very very important. Alignment your visuals and voice and everything is properly aligning. So what I wanted you guys to read is please read this book called Strategic Writing for UX by Tori Pod me Jarouski. Okay, you can read many case studies in Niesel donor groups in their website. It is available called Micro copy studies at 2024 you can read this book called don't make me think you can read this thing Content design London by toolkit. You can find this toolkit in the online. You can copy paste these keywords also and search a lot of articles. You can read this. You can attend this thing called UX Writing Hub Emotional copy boot camps to understand how people are doing it. If you wanted to go more deeper into the skill set. Unless until you are requiring that so the call to action is type words in the chat box. If you're watching this in YouTube or maybe Instagram or Spotify, wherever. Okay, once you do it I will send you a product Micro coffee How you can able to audit your application? Does it make your user calm or confused? And also you can redesign one flow using your hormone based copy framework. Yeah unless until you touch out and you try it out this you will not be able to do. Like let's say you can take Anyone application like PayPal, GPay or maybe phonepay or maybe Google or any copilot Microsoft. You can take any one application and try to understand how the flow can be changed in order to make my user segregate a different level of dopamine. Let's say cortisol like let's say oxytocin or let's say dopamine or you keep your user intact. Tomorrow we're going to see adaptive feedback and personalization. You'll be able to see the content exactly to the continuation of today in the day 25 okay and remember guys your visual attracts your eyes but your word builds exactly the trust what you're looking for. Thank you so much for connecting with me in this day 24. Tomorrow in the day 25 will be seeing adaptive feedback and personalization and take care all the best and make sure you also find the link below for our four hours design verse workshop. You can come and attend the workshop to understand how I'm putting all these topics and getting you into the next level of 3x salary in design. Some of our students implemented these techniques have got up to 2 to 3x in just two to three months after implementing it. So learning technically is fine but the end of the day you should be able to make it as a saleable skill for you in the market of design. So attend this workshop. I'll see you inside to teach you the nuances and techniques. Thank you so much all time. The.