Importance of UX Writing (Article)

UX copy (aka UX writing) is “the written content that users interact with” throughout a user interface. The main focus for UX copy is to make sure the interface is speaking the user’s language to ensure frictionless experience. Many things can factor into a “good UX copy” such as contextually apt language and consistent wordings that are concise yet clear to understand for any level of users - be it young/old or new/experienced users.

Here’s an example of where you can see a gap between the language the system speaks vs. language that users would understand:

This is the subscription account details page for Nespresso. Putting visual clutter and confusing layout aside for the sake of this article, just from this first section of the page I’m already confused as a user. I appreciate the ‘How to use your credits’ and the text underneath, however there seems to be a gap in education or communication around what ‘Choose your products’ and ‘Add a subscription’ are referring to. ‘Choose your products’ is actually guiding user to use their credit to order products, so this can be improved by rewording it to ‘Order products’ or ‘Order items using credits’. By referring to the actual end goal of the action, it’s much clearer to the user what their journey expectation is after clicking the button instead of the added uncertainty of ‘what’s going to happen after I choose? what are “products”? is this referring to another subscription program?’. Now on to the ‘Add a subscription’ button, this is again confusing, at first I thought this meant I’m adding more credit onto my existing credit subscription. However, once clicked, it actually leads you to their generic page where you can order a new machine or sign up for yet another subscription, and also logs you out while doing so. This is not a natural path for a credit subscription user unless they are not happy with the credit subscription service and would like to instead have specific items ordered on schedule. If the button instead stated ‘Explore different subscription’ (and wasn’t proposed as a secondary button right underneath ‘How to use your credits’ as this is not a secondary users would do to “use their credits”) or stated ‘Explore Nespresso Plus Subscription’, it would’ve significantly improved user understanding and journey, especially for this being placed at the top of the page as the first thing they see.

Once scrolled down from that section, you see a heading ‘Payment and Benefits Information’. Yet, you’ll notice the word “benefit” doesn’t actually come up again in the body of the section so what is this referring to? If it’s a conditional section that shows up, the wording should also be dynamic to avoid confusion.

On to the actual tables underneath, under the ‘Type’ column, you see two different categories: ‘You pay’ and ‘You receive’. When someone is signing up for a credit subscription, general assumption already is that you receive what you pay into your account. By having these two “transactional/technical” process displayed unnecessarily, it becomes even more confusing to user, and can also be seen as if the credit was “refunded” because of the minus (-) sign next to the amount. As a customer, our mental model isn’t that “if £25 goes out of my bank account, how much of it will get transferred into my subscription account”, because our assumption (and what we signed up for) is that 100% of it will be transferred into my subscription account.