Words Draw Out the Feedback

How many times have you presented an entire product experience only to have someone in the room zero in on one line of text and pick it apart? It doesn't matter whether you've thought a lot about that text, or whether you just dashed it off to give a general idea of something you intend to refine later—someone in the room will have something to say about it. Words invite feedback in a way that prototypes or visuals don't.

This power of words to invite feedback has frustrated and excited me for as long as I've been sharing design work. It's frustrating because it doesn't seem to matter how much I've thought the text—it will always be at least a little wrong to someone in the room. But it's also exciting because I've found that words have a unique way of getting everyone involved in the conversation.

Not everyone is comfortable providing feedback on the way a product looks or functions when a designer presents it. Designers (and other professionals everywhere) have a tendency to guard their expertise in a way that makes other people feel unqualified to express their opinions[^1]. But a shared language is everyone's domain and affords a friendlier environment for healthy criticism. And criticism is exactly what you want.

With this in mind, you can deploy your words throughout an interface with dual purpose. You can use them to communicate clearly to users, and you can also use them like lightning rods to draw out the criticism from unexpected sources. To do this you need to choose your words with intent. Your words should have a perspective; they should be precise enough so that they can be criticized. Then, when the criticism does sound, your perspective will help you focus the debate not on the actual words, but on what you're trying to say and why.

Recently while I was in the process of designing a registration flow, I reached a point where I had to write an SMS message that a user would receive inviting them to sign up. I had an immediate opinion about what the SMS should say, but I also felt like I might be wrong about that. I knew I needed to hear more perspectives. I worked hard to draft a first version of the SMS that was clear and opinionated, not because I knew it was the right strategic direction, but because I knew that having the opinion would allow me to draw out contrasting opinions. When I presented the work, one of the stakeholders from the marketing team zoomed right in on that SMS message and challenged it, like I hoped they would. The copywriting drew out an opinion from a voice that I didn't necessarily expect and we were able to talk about that SMS strategically, and not in terms of our favorite word choices.

Since some people seem to be more comfortable providing feedback on writing than other aspects of a design, you can use that tendency to draw out that feedback from an otherwise hesitant group. In the end, my advice is not to minimize the role that your product writing can play. It represents an opportunity to have an opinion and bring people into a design conversation who might have otherwise been silent.

[^1]: Alexander, C. (1979). The Timeless Way of Building. Taiwan: Oxford University Press. ’