Usability vs. voice: The great content design debate

Yesterday, I glanced at my LinkedIn feed and saw two posts weighing in on the role of voice in UX writing. They were both strongly worded and passionate, but they had two completely different perspectives.

One argued that UX writing isn’t creative and your copy shouldn’t be either — utility is what matters. The other argued that the power of UX writing is the use of voice and personality.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I’m here to offer a third perspective — they’re both wrong.

I’ve heard a lot of content designers argue the first point over the years and it seems to be picking up steam lately. The idea is that the job of good UX is to enable you to simply and easily complete your task. The writing is there to guide you along your journey, not to be clever or punchy. The more utilitarian the better since your goal is to complete a task not be entertained.

Here’s my problem with that perspective.

1. Every experience shouldn’t sound the same

   Imagine you’re signing up for TikTok. Now imagine you’re signing up for TurboTax. Do you want those onboarding experiences to sound and feel the same? Of course not. You’re in a completely different state of mind and looking for something different from each experience. The design and language you encounter in each one should reflect that — not just robotically usher you through the process.

2. Voice differentiates your product from the competition

   Imagine you’re choosing a product for your business. They both do basically the same thing and offer the same features. They even cost about the same and have similar reviews. If all else is created equal, your decision may very well come down to how you feel about each one. That feeling is influenced by voice and tone — and its role can’t be understated. Now you might think that’s important during consideration but not once someone becomes a customer. But what keeps someone loyal to one product vs. another? It’s certainly not an experience that feels generic.

3. Voice is how you connect to your users

   By and large, people dislike chatbots because they sound and feel robotic. Even if a chatbot is able to route you where you want to go, you probably still don’t enjoy the experience very often. While we all want to complete our tasks, we also want to feel good about our experience. One of my favorite UX was the Amazon 404 during Prime Day that featured employees’ dogs. Amazon isn’t a brand with a particularly punchy voice but they found a way to add a little bit of humanity to an otherwise frustrating moment.

You might be asking why I said both perspectives are wrong. After all, I just argued for the importance of voice. But they’re both wrong because they’re also both right.

Good UX writing is about creating experiences that people want to use. That means they have to be simple and easy to use, but they also have to feel human and unique.

What that looks like is different for every product but you can’t have good UX without incorporating both sides of that coin.