Before you invest in microcopy

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on microcopy, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The small words carry a lot of the experience
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Button and error text deserve real drafting. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Reassurance next to an action reduces hesitation. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about microcopy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Button and error text deserve real drafting — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.