Lessons Learned From the RWDevCon 2018 Design Lab

4. Copywriting

Writing text for your app is important and often overlooked once design and development has been completed. Well-written headlines, descriptions, labels and button text help the user to navigate and complete goals. Here’s some common copywriting mistakes we saw at the design lab and how to fix them.

It’s typical to go with the first thing that pops into your head when labeling buttons, links and input fields. It might be obvious to you what your chosen label describes, but is actually confusing to your users. These choices must be appealing when trying to get the user to complete a goal, like creating an account. The result is a sub-optimal experience with incomplete forms, fewer sales, misinterpretation of the features and general confusion when interacting with your user interface.

On Airbnb’s home screen, for example, developers want to make it as easy as possible for the user to discover properties and manage their trips. They’ve achieved this with well-chosen and thoughtful labels:

1. To encourage users to search and discover properties, they’ve swapped out what would be a typical input placeholder like ‘Search Here’ with a more appealing prompt for the user to try a destination, such as ‘Try Costa del Sol.’
2. The navigation labels on this page convey the expected behavior and you can interpret what’s behind each tab like ‘Saved’ and ‘Trips’ without much guesswork. The button elements ‘Dates’ and ‘Guests’ are succinct and support the context of the search field.

User testing can help to uncover how effectively your interface labels are written. Go through your app with a colleague and ask him or her to describe what your labels convey. Your labels should be self-explanatory, so you’ll quickly discover if you’ve made poor choices when their descriptions misalign with your intentions. You can get a nice bump in account sign-ups, user retention and in app purchases by paying attention to the button labels on sign-in and transaction pages. Try to upgrade bland actions to more appealing ones. ‘Get Started Now’ is always better than ‘Create Account,’ as it sounds like an action and not a process.

It can be easy to get carried away telling the user about every problem your app solves when trying to get them to sign up or subscribe to a paid service. In reality, users don’t read large blocks of text; they scan for the most appealing information.

Looking at Duolingo’s sign-in page, its aim is for users to create a free account. The page is blissfully simple with a short headline and clear call to action. There’s a couple of things to take note of in this design:

1. It’s short. There are no paragraphs and it describes the outcome of using the app in under seven words. The developers could overwhelm the user here and say that you can learn over 10+ languages and be part of a community of thousands of other students. Instead, they’ve done well to keep it succinct, easy to digest and distraction free.
2. It highlights that the product is free, which is always appealing and an important feature for most users.
3. The page is completed with a positive ‘Get Started’ button instead of something that sounds like a lot of effort like ‘Create Account’.

In contrast, let’s take a look at a call to action in Apple Music. At this point, Apple is trying to convert users to paying a subscription by highlighting its recommendation service. The copy here is sub-optimal, and there’s room for improvement in this design:

1. The headline ‘Let us find your next favorite,’ although short, fails to focus on the outcome for the user. It reads passively and could have multiple interpretations.
2. The paragraph below has appealing benefits, but most users will not take the time to read it. One of the best features of subscribing is that you can download music and listen to it offline, but that’s hidden away in this text.
3. Finally, ‘Choose Your Plan’ probably isn’t the best call to action here. Even if there is a free option. Mentioning the plan at this stage makes the user think about the exchange of money and they’re less likely to click through.

Good copywriting is a learning process. The most effective way to achieve success is to design several options and A/B test them. This way, you get to quantitatively improve your copy and discover what features are most appealing to your users. Good copywriting on sign-in and payment screens can increase account sign-ups, transactions and improve user retention. To entice users, choose the most important features of your app and highlight it in the fewest words possible. If you must include multiple features in your copy, try a short bullet pointed list instead of blocky paragraphs.

Where to Go From Here?

We’ve taken a look at some of the common design problems that arise when creating mobile apps. To avoid making these same mistakes, we recommend user testing as one way to uncover some of these issues. Talk to your users to find their pain points. There’s some powerful tools out there that can help you recruit users and record their actions like usertesting.com.

Leverage the design systems that mobile apps are built on by reading the Apple and Google Material Design guidelines. These guides provide a lot of information you can use right away to improve the appearance and user experience.

Conduct regular competitor research to ensure your experience is modern and as good or better than the others apps in your market.

Review your copy; it’s important! Don’t just go with the first thing that comes to mind.

Extra reading: Learn about the when and why of choosing design patterns here.