UX Writing — Combining Product Intent with User Story for Great Copy
On Saturday, May 28th. I was having a class about UX Copy case studies. We’re being given a product brief and then tasks to generate copy based on the brief itself.
While practicing together to solve the case study, my point of interest always looking at the Product Intent and User Story because I think that they are the most influential part of creating a great copy.
But, what is Product Intent?
In short, if the product is a person, what are they trying to communicate or give to another person at a specific time?
I’m saying specific time because one product could have many product intents, it defines where are the user now and what states that the application is shown.
This is the example of a Product Intent sent to me, let’s called the product with Movis
Movis is a product that gives thousands of movies recommendation that user could watch at any given moment, they have a feature called Smart Downloads where the user can download the movies and save it to their phone storage so that they can watch it offline later. Movis is trying to having a user to set how much storage (in Gigabyte) they would give to Movis to save movies they would watch.
And User Story?
User story came with a pattern of:
As a… [who are the user?]
I want to… [what are they trying to achieve?]
so that… [what benefits they would get? how it would solve their problem?]
This user story is really just a short sentence that will be useful for us designers to empathize with user conditions and goals. because it gives us context about what is happening right now from the user's point of view.
And for our case, the user story would be:
As a user, I want to know how I provide storage on my device so that I can download my movies from Movis.
Draft Copy
Based on this understanding, all we have to do is by asking:
How might we connect and fulfill between what is the product is trying to communicate and the user needs?
My draft is something like this:
Enjoy your movies offline by activating smart downloads.
If you spotted it, this doesn’t actually solve the needs on the user side, it just focused too much on providing information from the product side. Not just that, this copy forgets that the product is trying to tell the user how to set their storage device but all it mention here is just the Smart Downloads feature.
Final Copy
After revising and rethink about the product brief, I finally came up with this copy:
Set a storage device before watching your movies offline
Notice that now it’s getting clearer and more informative, what I was trying to come up with here is a copy that focuses on telling the user if they want to get to their goal they need to do a specific task, yet we also giving guidance about what they need to do.
Kinda tricky, but if you read the brief, again and again, you might find something even better. Just please, do not ever read the problem once.
Conclusion
When we look at the task that is given to us, we often only look at just 1 perspective, us. Try to look at the other ones, a good communication plays where it affects not only where the communication came from but to whom it would be received.
Fun Fact:
This is my first article in a while since I haven’t gotten my hand dirty on writing useful things, so this article might not be my best but we keep iterating.
