When microcopy is worth the effort

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Microcopy is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is worth it

The small words carry a lot of the experience. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Reassurance next to an action reduces hesitation. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

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
• The small words carry a lot of the experience — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.