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July 7th, 2008

Nobody reads copy

If many in our indus­try are to be believed, copy is some­what of a optional extra when it comes to mar­coms. Or maybe a nec­es­sary evil. To be tol­er­ated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in adver­tis­ing which has become increas­ingly image-led over the years. Direct mail still resists, bol­stered by the moun­tains of evi­dence that copy dri­ves response. And then there’s web.

Look at the usabil­ity stud­ies and you’ll see that effec­tive web copy is a case of less is more. Unfor­tu­nately many design­ers seem to take this as an excuse to design lay­outs allow­ing not 30 words, but 30 char­ac­ters of copy – even on highly com­plex prod­ucts. Rather than help­ing to struc­ture the mes­sage, all too often copy is seen as the stuff that sim­ply replaces the lorem ipsum in the design.

This is nuts.

It’s copy, more often than not, that vis­i­tors to a site are look­ing for. It’s copy that sells prod­ucts, ser­vices and ideas. Copy is a core part of the expe­ri­ence. This is espe­cially so in B2B where com­plex argu­ments must be com­mu­ni­cated effi­ciently, pow­er­fully and elegantly.

This is not a call to have end­less scrolling copy on every page you serve. Good copy can achieve its aims in sur­pris­ingly few words.

So just as an exper­i­ment, on the next site you cre­ate – start with the copy.

Related posts:

  1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

3 Comments »

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  • http://www.noiseinthewires.com Lau­rent

    I agree with you: when it comes to product-oriented web­sites, i am con­vinced that peo­ple are look­ing for quick answers to ques­tions such as “do they have the prod­uct I need?”, “where can I buy it?”, “how can I con­tact them if I have a prob­lem with a prod­uct?”… The chal­lenge is to be able to antic­i­pate these ques­tions so as to answer them in the short­est pos­si­ble way.

    I’ll try your lit­tle experiment.

    Mean­while, i won­der if you had the chance to iden­tify repeat­ing struc­tures when prepar­ing copies for dif­fer­ent cus­tomers and develop reusable patterns.

  • http://b1blog.wordpress.com/ Jay Ball

    I try to avoid using tem­plated struc­tures pre­fer­ring instead to try to for­get what I know about the client’s busi­ness and try to come at the job from a customer’s view­point. What does a suc­cess­ful visit mean for them? Can they get to what they need quickly and eas­ily? Am I per­suad­ing them to change their view of the brand, increas­ing the desir­abil­ity of the prod­uct or get­ting them to take the next step in a pur­chase? (Very much the kinds of ques­tions you out­line but maybe a lit­tle more focused on chang­ing behaviour.)

    BTW if you are look­ing for lan­guage struc­tures, a use­ful book is “Words that change minds” by Shelle Rose Charvet.

  • http://noiseinthewires.com Lau­rent

    Jay,

    Thanks for the ref­er­ence: I will get a hold on the book.

    I have read an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the con­cept of “flow”, a way of cre­at­ing designs for goal-oriented web­sites (the ques­tions in my first post). It con­cep­tu­alises your point of “get­ting them to take the next step in a pur­chase”. You might find it inter­est­ing too:

    http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/design-for-emotion