The words in your product are — quite literally — your direct line of communication with your users. These words are responsible for educating users, helping them overcome roadblocks, and guiding them to success. From new user onboarding, to error messages, to CTAs, product text is one of the few tools that is directly in your control to create a clear, valuable experience in your product. Basically, your product text is crazy important.

At the same time, though, product text is often treated like an afterthought. Whether it’s lorem ipsum placeholder text with the intention to “fill this in later”, or text written in a stagnant Google Doc that becomes obsolete mere moments after finishing the last sentence, product text is one of the most under-leveraged parts of your user’s experience. But it doesn’t have to be this way; by building an intentional, systemized approach to the words in your product, you can ship better product text that supports, educates, and delights your users.

Want to start writing better product content? Here are 8 things you can start doing today to help you get there.

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1. Sweat the small stuff

When it comes to product text, every word matters. Breezing over your CTA button text because it’s just a few words is like not caring if you have a front doorknob: It might be small, but it sure is mighty. Product text directly influences the metrics you care about, like completion rates, conversion, retention, and more. Build time for product content into your development cycles from the start, leaving space to review and iterate on every piece of product text in your designs.

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2. Write text in context

Product content should be written with your end users in mind. Are most of your users logging in on mobile? Better make sure text is short and wraps cleanly on a phone. Are users logging in to complete a quick task, or do they have time to peruse? Write your product content with user context in mind to make it as valuable as possible.

💡 Ditto tip: Import your Figma design files directly into Ditto to iterate or rewrite text directly alongside design context, so you can be sure the words you’re writing work in the product screens (without messing up your designer’s flow).

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3. Be obsessive about consistency

Users are perceptive; inconsistencies or disjointed product experiences will impact their perception of your product as a whole. This includes your words. Creating a consistent standard for universal text in your product, such as error states or helper text, is a nonnegotiable to build trust and create a cohesive experience no matter where your user goes in your product. This will make users more successful as they navigate and actually try to accomplish important tasks in your product.

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4. Help your team discover and reuse content

The best way to drive consistency (without over-engineering painful review processes) is to build a reusable repository of approved product content, like a design system for product text. This means that your team can write it once and reuse it anywhere else it shows up in your product. Making text discoverable and reusable across teams drives a consistent experience for your users, while also driving efficiency for your team, too: No more reinventing the wheel every time your team sets out to build a new product screen!

💡 Ditto tip: Our component library makes it easy for teams to build one centralized, integrated library for reusable text. Turn any piece of text into a component so anyone, on any team, can search and reuse that pre-approved text in seconds. Makes consistency second nature!

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5. Make words additive (not a stopgap)

While product content is a powerful tool, it’s not a band-aid for a poor user experience. Use product text in the areas of your product that require more guidance, context, or support, but don’t flood your UI with tooltips and instructions as a stopgap to something that should be solved with design.

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6. Make it personal

As your product scales to new markets, your content needs to scale, too: Unlike design elements, which can stay pretty much universal, it’s important to customize your product content to each new market you’re in. This can mean varying languages, prices, or colloquialisms depending on who you’re speaking to. While it may be added work, these changes are what elevate your user’s experience and build connection and loyalty.

💡 Ditto tip: Variants allow you to create and store variations on any text item in Ditto. With Variants, you can easily add unlimited translations or segmentation on top of your base text, and preview that variant text directly in your designs (without having to copy and paste screens).

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7. Enable cross-functional reviews

Product content is one of the most cross-functional parts of the product development process. So many people — from design, to content, to marketing, to legal and compliance — have opinions and requirements about the words you show to users. And the best product content accounts for all these perspectives. Creating an easy way to manage feedback, collect suggestions, and gather inputs before you ship product content is crucial to not just shipping the best work, but also removing unnecessary rework.

💡 Ditto tip: Ditto has built-in review functionality to make it simple for teams to edit, give feedback, and track changes to product content in one place. Text statuses, version history, notifications, and suggested edits are all built into Ditto’s UI to centralize and manage all the important opinions in a copy review workflow!

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8. Iterate and evaluate (obsessively)

Any good product person knows that shipping the work doesn’t mean the work is done. Product content is no different. To get to the best words for each area of your product, you need to take an iterative, agile approach. Measure sticking points or dropoff rates in your product, and then iterate or A/B test the content, and ship incremental improvements to see if you can influence adoption or retention without requiring a time-intensive redesign.

💡 Ditto tip: Integrating with Ditto’s API makes it easy to make changes to your product content without relying on engineering resources. By connecting Ditto with your codebase, once you make a copy change in Ditto, that can be updated with a simple API pull.

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We all spend countless hours (and dollars) obsessively improving a user’s experience in the products we build. And yet, a huge driver of that experience, our product content, is being treated as an afterthought that we need to rush through so we don’t slow down dev timelines. With Ditto, teams can create an intentional system around the words they’re showing users so they can transform product content from an afterthought to an asset.

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