Aug 26, 20213 min read

How do you make your app talk to the users? 🤔

Updated: Jan 30

Welcome back to my weekly newsletter. This is going to be a series of articles covering how we came up with the idea of Calm Sleep, scaled to over a million users in less than a year, and all that with less than $1,000 worth of total investment. 🌱

I’m Akshay Pruthi, an entrepreneur who loves to build products from the ground up. Over the past 6 years, I’ve built multiple products from scratch and scaled them to millions of users. This is my attempt to share our most important lessons from building one of those apps - Alora (Android) and Alora (iOS) 🤗

Every week I will publish an article about a different challenge we faced while building Calm Sleep.

Last week, we discussed - how all of your answers are in front of you! You just need to observe!🧐

What is in this week’s read

The art of UX writing.

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How do you make your app speak to the users to influence their decisions on the app?

Disclaimer: I am not very good with writing. I believe I have a steep learning curve ahead. Lately, while reading a bunch of articles, I stumbled upon something that stuck by me.

I always believed that UX or product writing is all about fancy marketing words that catch the user’s attention. Little did I know, there’s a huge difference between copywriting (Fancy/salesy writing) vs product writing (crisp/to the point).

What’s your opinion of the following writing style:

Here, you either have an option to enter your email or feel guilty for picking the option that says “No, I hate being healthy”. ,. As a marketer, I would have said - The writer has used an amazing tactic by putting the end-user in a tough spot. But as a customer, I would feel manipulated with either choice. And to be honest, this tactic definitely doesn’t give results. Check it out yourself here.

Here’s how it should look like:

The more I read about it, the more I realised I was so wrong assuming that clickbaity words work better for a product. Digging deeper, I learnt the key differences between copywriting and UX writing.

How does one get better at UX-writing?

Now the million-dollar question, how should we converse better with the users?

I stumbled upon this strategy that Google uses to improve their ux writing.

Basically, they stick to the following three principles:

Be Clear: Remove all the technical terms and put the action in the context of the user.
Be Concise: Cross out the wrong words.
Be Useful: Understand people’s motivation and align your copy with it to help them get what they want.

They gave a brilliant example of how they moved from bad UX writing to a better one.

Be Clear:

Be Concise

Be Useful

IMPACT

I like how Jeremy Moser does it. Here are a few examples:

How we did it at Calm Sleep led to a 17% increase in our payment conversion

Here’s what I did:

Talked to 50 users and tried to identify the common phrases they were using repeatedly. This helped me understand their motivation.
Follow Google’s method of crossing the words until it made total sense.
Make it conversational and NOT authoritative.