UI text: Simplicity is difficult

Have you ever looked at a beautiful website and said, Huh?" You can incorporate the latest JS framework and the best CSS, excel in accessibility, and make your website as beautiful as a Rembrandt, but websites with walls of text will still drive users away. Mike Jang explains that to keep your users happy you need excellent UI text, also known as microcopy.

Web applications frequently have two audiences: end users (consumers) and administrators. End users don’t want to bother with documentation, especially for “simple” tasks such as creating a new account. And while administrators may be more understanding, they also don’t want to deal with documentation for everyday tasks. (They don’t want to refer to documentation just to configure a new property, for example.) And they certainly don’t want to decipher a “self-documenting” developer Java class. Meanwhile, many UI developers don’t have the skills needed to create awesome UI text. Mike Jang explains that to keep your users happy you need excellent UI text, also known as microcopy. Microcopy can save time—and make the difference in selling an application. Mike shares the lessons he’s learned creating microcopy for a new administrative and end-user web interface and discusses the stakeholders that he had to navigate in order to implement a microcopy style guide for a suite of web applications.