Delightful experiences through funny microcopy.
When jokes set you apart.
It’s not new news that in these times of conversational designs, UX writing can bring out that extra oomph applications are fighting for.
One thing that words can easily do is, bring levity and humor into the user’s experience. And why do we need to make our applications funnier? Answer; ‘the humor effect,’ a cognitive bias. The humor effect says that we tend to remember things much more quickly when it is humorous and tend to have a positive association with them.
Illustrations and animations can be a great way to make platforms funny, but words give you that wiggle room to experiment and iterate. Iteration being the mantra of great design and even greater comedy.
So, I was scrolling through Netflix one fine evening and casually went to the ‘New & Hot’ section. I was really stocked to see a lot of fun upcoming movies and series in the form of scrollable cards. At the bottom of each card for each title, there were keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases that described the content acted as a quick nudge to spark curiosity and interest in the users. This easily formed the immediate identity of the movie or series.
One such upcoming movie was ‘The Monkey King.’
And that’s when I saw it, and I completely lost my mind. One of the keywords for that movie was ‘monkeys.’
Do I want to watch a movie whose identity is ‘monkey’? Of course, I want to! I mean, who doesn’t want to?!
I was amazed when I realized that a single word in some corner of Netflix made me feel so good. I think what worked was the tone of that particular microcopy. Specifically three aspects of the tone.
- It was subtle and simple.
- It was perfectly in line with the nature of the content.
- It was good-natured and unexpected.
That was all it took to release a cocktail of neurochemicals in my monkey brain and make me laugh out loud.
Using humor in microcopies can be wonderfully rewarding. It can not only bring short spurts of delight to the user but also give personality to the platform and signal it effectively. That said, humor in microcopy can also be quite tricky. Especially when it comes to things like localization. Localization is when you alter the copy for a different place (geographically or culturally). If not taking into account how these jokes can be perceived across cultural contexts, they can miss the point and, worse, offend users. As they say, ‘When it comes to content, context is king.’
We all could really use some chuckles in our daily lives. When that comes from applications or corners within the application that we least expect, that will make us remember the journey more.
Since we are on the topic of ux writing, what do you call twin baby crows? mi-crow copies…I am sorry for that.
