Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice in UX Writing

I hope almost everyone faces the above problem in the digital world, but suppose you are designing an error message for your website, sometimes we will be confused about which options would be best suited for our design?

Like below example:

Not sure yet?

I know it’s very hard to tell which option will best work for our target user. No problem, nngroup found a solution for that, so we decided to create a manageable UX-specific tool that content strategists could use for simple tone profiles.

So, in the beginning, we have to understand what is the tone of the voice?

The tone of voice represents how we want people to feel about our digital products after reading our copy and messaging. In literature, the tone of voice refers to the author’s feelings towards the subject, as expressed through the writing itself. In UX, every scrap of writing on a page, from body copy to button labels contributes to the tone of voice that we’re using to speak to our users and it should “Be consistent, Be authentic, Be unique” in the whole product, a group of people from NN/g identified four parameters which will make the tone of voice consistent throughout the whole product. So the tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along with four dimensions humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm, here is the tool below:

Small descriptions about these tools:

This meter indicates, is the writer trying to be funny? Or is the subject approached in a serious way?

This tells, is the writer trying to be formal? Informal? Casual?

This indicates, does the writer approach the subject in a respectful way? Or an irreverent way?

It represents Is the writer enthusiastic about the subject? Excited about the service or product? Or is the writing dry and matter-of-fact?

How does it work?

So now we will analyze one example using this tool.

So, we can see in the above example that the user forgot to enter his/her name and got an error message, and on the right-hand side meter indicates that “It’s a fairly traditional, straightforward error message.” Let’s tweak one of the dimensions by making this a little more friendly.

It’s still a pretty straightforward error message lets make it a more respectful way.

Ok, let’s try one more variation of an error message.

It seems like a more serious way we are showing the error message.

Which of these versions of the same message would work best?

That depends on your brand personality, but also on your users and the context. So the best way to know which tones will work with your users is to test.

The Take-Away

• Voice of tone should be the same throughout the whole product.

• A group of people from NN/g identified four parameters which will make the tone of voice consistent throughout the whole product.

• Content can be analyzed along with four dimensions humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.

• Create a different tone of voice using the above-mentioned tool and for validating, test with your user.

References and where to learn more

•https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tone-voice-samples/

•https://www.nngroup.com/videos/establishing-tone-voice/