How powerful is UX copy? In recent years, more and more companies discover the value behind thoughtful content design. When done strategically, UX copy can have quite a big impact on what our users do within the product.
The right information presented in the right way can help people make more informed decisions – or less informed ones if you’re using them in a bad way. Cleverly placed UX copy can place attention on the next steps your user needs to take, reducing confusion and improving the overall usability of the product. And carefully-crafted brand voices can provoke positive emotional responses, making the product more memorable and engaging.
"Cleverly placed UX copy can place attention on the next steps your user needs to take, reducing confusion and improving the overall usability of the product."
All good things, with a positive aggregated effect on the bottom line for businesses. It’s no wonder UX writing roles are becoming more and more common in companies worldwide.
But what makes UX copy so effective? And how can we tell if a piece of copy is the best it can be?
Why don’t teams collect copy metrics?
Fast-paced sprints don’t leave a lot of time for retrospection. Pressure from both management and users drives us all to try and achieve as many checkmarks as possible in the short time we have. Teams often don’t take a moment to reflect on their mistakes or wins, and talk about how they can further improve their work. Instead, they move straight to the next item on their plate.
On top of time and budget constraints, isolating the effects of UX copy specifically requires special preparation and careful planning. Since so many other factors can impact a user’s response, you want to make sure the test you’re currently running has minimal additional factors weaved in. Trying to measure design, copy, and interaction at the same time will result in inaccurate data. Even combining several copy tests at once can be detrimental to your data quality.
"Teams often don’t take a moment to reflect on their mistakes or wins, and talk about how they can further improve their work. Instead, they move straight to the next item on their plate."
How to start measuring UX copy performance
Generating metrics and tracking the performance is critically important when it comes to UX copy. Every single word carries so much weight – impacting both the experience and the business side of the product.
And since writing is subjective, it is nearly impossible to make a definite decision without data: discussions would be never-ending. Working in a data-driven way can generate tie-breakers, help cut unnecessary discussions short, and inform our decisions in an objective, efficient way.
Once we have real-life data about the performance of our UX copy, we can also use that to improve the copy we write in the future. Investing now in a solid infrastructure for data collection will make life easier for us in the long term.
There are multiple ways to measure our copy’s performance, for example:
- Running an A/B test: Comparing the following metrics in two versions of your product is one of the most popular ways to gather data. Through this type of test, you can estimate which of the two versions will outperform the other. You can work with the measurement tools you already use to track product performance. Simply create two versions of the copy, and see how each version works for you. Alternatively, you can use dedicated experimentation tools like Optimizely or UXCam to get more detailed data and a richer list of features.
- Using heatmaps: Measuring which sections of your screen get more “action” (in the form of visibility, clicks, mouse movements, etc.) can help you identify problematic or confusing sections – affecting both the copy and the design. You can install tracking apps like Hotjar or Crazy Egg to get full visibility over your interface.
- Performing usability tests: Watching a small sample of users as they use the app, either at your offices or remotely, can help understand how the copy performs when met by real live users. This type of test can also help you identify which copy elements can be improved to further support the experience. Dedicated apps for usability testing offer a rich set of tools that can help answer your questions. Try Lookback for face-to-face testing and UsabilityHub for remote tests.
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What metrics should you use to measure your copy performance?
Once we choose our methods, it’s time to decide what we’re going to measure. There are infinite data points we can collect and unlimited graphs we can design. But not all metrics are created equal. When it comes to UX copy, some metrics can provide highly valuable and actionable insights, while others are better to drive visual or business decisions.
If you can, try and collect additional quantitative to create a more holistic view of copy performance. Some trends are simply too complex to be captured in numbers.
Let’s say you’re writing for a travel booking app. You want your users to easily find and book a hotel at their destination. Here are six metrics you can start measuring today to get insights into your copy performance:
1. User engagement: With people’s attention spans shrinking and competition continuously growing, user engagement can be a critical metric. If your app copy keeps people engaged, it can help promote success in all other aspects.
In the case of our travel booking app, we might decide to measure things like:
- How long people spend in the app on average
- How many times they clicked on one of the hotel pages
- How many pages they viewed overall
and similar metrics, to understand how engaged users were.
2. Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the number of users who complete a desired action on your product, like making a purchase or signing up for a service. This metric is an excellent indicator of the effectiveness of your UX copy in guiding users to take action.
If we were writing for that travel booking app, a great way to measure conversion is to check how many of our users book a hotel through the app. Since we can assign a monetary value to each conversion (=booking), we can also use this to measure the difference in gross income brought by this specific change of UX copy.
3. Task success rate: This metric measures how successful users are in completing a given task. To measure this metric, we look at how many people started to complete the task, vs. how many people made it to the end. It can be especially helpful to evaluate the usability of our copy.
For example, if the travel app example, we could measure the booking flow for task success rate - checking how many users actually managed to find and book a hotel vs. how many people tried and dropped out in the process.
4. Time on task: This is used to measure how long it takes a user to complete a task. In this metric, we’re only looking at the people who actually managed to complete the task at hand, measuring the average time they needed. This metric is great to measure continuous improvement.
If we see people taking too long to complete their hotel booking, we can try and pinpoint the reasons for the delay and provide additional guidance through copy. Repeatedly measuring time on task can shed light on the change in usability almost immediately even shortly after the change was performed.
5. User error rate: Measuring how many errors or wrong actions our users make on a specific task, on average, can help us identify places where the copy might not be clear enough - or places where it’s most helpful.
In our case, a high error rate throughout our booking flow can be an indication that the copy is not clear enough, and could be improved. A reduced error rate could indicate that we’ve managed to make the booking process easier and simpler through better UX copy.
6. User satisfaction: Measuring how happy our users are is traditionally done through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric measures how likely a user is to recommend your product to others - and it’s a great indicator of how people feel about the product after using it. Popping the NPS question after a specific flow can help tie the results to that task - as well as the copy within it.
If users say they’d recommend our travel app to their friends, we can take this as a sign that the copy worked for them. While this isn’t a definite metric, it can be used to support other data and offer another point of view.
What can we do with our newfound data?
Once the UX writer has all the data they need, it’s easy to start taking actionable steps to improve the copy. In some cases, the data might point us in the direction of a simple, quick fix. In others, it might reveal the need for a more in-depth process of testing, iteration, and refinement.
Either way, having data to back our decisions can help us make more informed, better decisions when it comes to our UX copy.
We can use the data to identify which copy elements are working and which ones need improvement. Estimate the impact of a certain change and decide if it’s worth investing the time and effort. Or understand how different copy variants affect user behavior. And, of course, we can use it to show other team members and stakeholders how valuable UX copy can be in solving usability issues – and promote better collaboration between writers and other product team members.
"Once the UX writer has all the data they need, it’s easy to start taking actionable steps to improve the copy. In some cases, the data might point us in the direction of a simple, quick fix. In others, it might reveal the need for a more in-depth process of testing, iteration, and refinement."
