Your product has a voice

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

R. McKee — "Story"

Your product talks all the time. It talks when it names a button, when it titles a screen, when it warns that something went wrong, when it finds no results, when it sends an email at three in the morning to confirm something nobody asked to have confirmed. That stream of sentences is a voice, even if nobody decided it.

And that is the point. The voice is not optional. The only thing that gets decided is whether someone writes it or whether it accumulates by sedimentation: a label that came from the backend, another that came out of a requirements document, an error message that is literally the name of an exception, help text run through a tool on a Friday afternoon. The result has a voice all the same. It sounds like an administrative form with an English accent.

Character shows under pressure

McKee has a rule worth applying to products without changing a word: true character is revealed in the choices someone makes under pressure. Not in what they say when everything is fine, but in what they do when something forces them to choose.

Products behave in exactly this way. Their character does not appear on the welcome screen, which is where all the care is concentrated because that is what gets shown in the demo. It appears the moment the person is blocked: the payment that does not go through, the file that will not upload, the session that drops in the middle of a long form.

When at that moment the product says "an error has occurred", it is communicating something perfectly clear, and it is not what it thinks it is communicating. It is saying that nobody attended to the worst part of the experience. Failure states are the most honest evidence there is about a product's quality, precisely because nobody puts them in presentations.

There is a second, equally revealing moment: when the product has to say no. Denying a permission, rejecting a request, explaining that something is not included in the plan the customer bought. Almost every product handles this badly, and badly in the same direction: it hides behind an impersonal construction so that there is nobody left to complain to.

Against anaesthetised language

Orwell diagnosed eighty years ago the disease afflicting ninety per cent of the text in our products, and he did it while writing about politics. His central observation was that vague language is not a stylistic failing but a way of not committing. When you write "an error has occurred" instead of "we couldn't charge you because your bank declined the card", you are not being more professional: you are avoiding saying something that could be checked.

That avoidance has a cost. Every sentence that says nothing has to be translated by someone, and that someone is usually the person using the product, at the moment they least feel like translating anything. When they cannot, they write to support. Foggy vocabulary is not free: it gets paid in tickets.

The opposite of that fog is not a chummy product. It is worth naming the other drift, which in recent years has done as much damage as legalese: the product that sounds like an enthusiastic colleague. "Oops! Something went wrong, but don't worry 🙌". That is not a voice either; it is a costume. And under pressure — pressure again — it is insulting, because somebody has just lost half an hour of work and the product answers with an emoji.

Writing is designing

The practical conclusion is awkward for the way we usually organise ourselves: text is not a layer applied at the end over something already built. It is part of the building, and it is often the part that decides whether the feature is understood at all.

There is a check that almost never fails. Take a feature that is not quite working and, before redesigning the flow, try writing in two sentences what it does and who it is for. If you cannot, the problem was not the flow. Very often the improvement you are chasing with three new screens can be had by changing one label, because the problem was never mechanical — it was that nobody knew what was going on.

A voice of your own, well written, does more than look good: it saves product. And that saving is the cheapest form of differentiation available, because almost nobody practises it.