Role:
UX Writing Lead
Tools:
Figjam, Slack, Figma, LettuceMeet, Google Docs, Notion
Timeline:
January 2024 to April 2024
Team:
Janet Walker, Alexa King, Mahnoor Tufail, Bethany Vanderhorst
What is The Melanin Village?
The Melanin Village is the growth-centered gathering space that provides curriculum and community for Black and Brown homeschoolers. The Melanin Village is a homeschool support site with social media elements.
Calls to InAction
Web Analytics data showed users bottleneck on specific pages, spending much larger amounts of time than necessary or expected. A more worrying statistic showed a not insignificant amount of users left the site completely from these pages. I proposed the UX Writing Team audit the current site copy. Our audit yielded interesting findings:
Repetition
Of the 12 calls to action on the site, 6 of them were either “get started” or “learn more.” This repetative text came off as disingenuous, since it sounded like the product of a copy-paste session. It wasn’t, the people at The Melanin Village care deeply about what they’re doing, but the copy didn’t reflect that.
Vague Language
“Get Started” and “Learn More” don’t actually give a very consistent picture of what the user can expect to find on the other end of those links. Users could very easily follow the link and be met with a credit card field, making the link seem dishonest.
Scattered Emphasis
The Melanin Village’s team cared a great deal about the services they provide, and so their original copy contained a great deal of emphasis. All told, the original copy for the Melanin Village’s Site contained six methods of emphasis:
- Bolding
- Underlining
- Italics
- Font Coloring
- All Caps
- Orphan Lines
The Challenge
After dissecting copy audit results and comparing them to Web Analytics Data, it became clear the copy was lacking clarity and direction. Users weren’t always sure where to go next to achieve the outcome they wanted and were even leaving the site out of frustration. This was not the only source of frustration, however:
A Closed Lexicon
Like most educational applications, The Melanin Village uses in-group vocabulary to notate user progression. Unlike most educational applications, The Melanin Village uses in-group vocabulary to refer to users, groups of users, and their children. Many of these terms overlap with common English words, so users without proper context could easily be confused by them. Luckily, there are ways to introduce these terms without a lengthy tutorial:
Consistent Emphasis
It’s not uncommon to bold constructed language to get readers to pay attention to it. This language isn’t constructed, but consistent bolding informs users these terms are different.
Tooltips
Definitions appearing in self-contained on-hover elements. Tooltips give the user the option to remind themselves of a term at any point, even after a summer vacation or other break.
Persistent Elements
Dropdown, hamburger, and banner menus follow the user from page to page almost universally. Using some of this terminology in these common page elements ensured the user was often reminded of those definitions.
Key Takeaways and Future Projects
Clarity and Direction are absolutely essential to any copywriting for User Experience. It’s essential that the user know how to directly achieve what they want to achieve.
In-group vocaublary needs to be consciously established by the Design Team. A shorthand for long time users is a powerful thing, but the infrastructure to establish it has to be implemented consistently in order for the Design team to draw any benefit.
During this process, I acknowledged the project’s scope, and chose to focus on the challenges I was best equipped to address. In the following phase I focused on implementing more features:
- Documentation to ensure consistent copy across platforms.
- Differentiation between paying and non-paying members.
- Social Media methods to keep track of shared interests.