I’m at a conference,
there are pens with The Company logo
on them everywhere, none work. The pens
are on every seat you sit on. They invariably find their way into you bag, back
pocket and behind you ear. Now they are
all over the house, with The Company
logo glistening in the sunlight, and still not one of them works. All I associate The Company with is useless broken products.’ Bad microcopy.
Bill Beard
wrote in Smashing Magazine about the importance of microcopy to a successful user experience. ‘Microcopy is the label on a form field, a tiny piece of
instructional text, or the word on a button.’
While bad microcopy can actively drive users away, good microcopy may often
go unnoticed. However, well executed microcopy can even be used to build
branding moments ‘when you purposefully inject your brands tone or voice into
what would normally be a straight forward user interaction.’ Like the image
below from rosettastone. (I also
think this sentence from Beards ‘about me’ paragraph constitutes a personal branding
moment - ‘Bill loves building
brands and creating great experiences, but hates talking about himself in the
third person.’)
Beards
discussion is all about the digital but there are thousands of instances of both
good and over looked microcopy in the physical world; these can be equally
influential to an experience and to a person’s impression of an organisation.
At my
dinner table I often hear about a large pharmaceutical company (similar to many
across the globe I’m sure) where very capable adults and PhD graduates are
exasperated by a frequent barrage of patronising signs reminding them to hold hand
rails and not to run with scissors etc. Health and safety; they have to be
pedantic, but does it have to be infuriating? Much of modern comedy plays off the
intricacies and idiocies of life in organisations, see Parks and Recreation. What if health and safety played up to this;
exaggerated their pedantic ways and instead of infuriating employees, amused
them? Get your point across; but rather
than making your employees irritated by their workplace, make them happy to be
there… Stay tuned for our health and safety signage revamp.
A
