The Bastard Child of UX: Microcopy

Sathyvelu Kunashegaran
8 min readOct 25, 2017

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The evolution of user experience.

Just like how the internet as we know has been evolving, user experience design has been changing as well. Nowadays, most UX designers that I meet are still stuck with the 2010s definition of UX. They define UX as the fonts and typography, the colors, the content and how is it displayed, and the flow from one part of the experience to the other.

The fact is that to out-innovate other companies, most startups and big companies are forced to look at other components of their product to deliver a better user experience. Since 2015, the latest component that has been included in the arsenal of a UX designer is the small bits of copy that appear on an app’s interface to guide, to reassure or to delight customers i.e. The Microcopy.

I always believed that words and copy is just as powerful if not more compared to the colors and the flow of an app. It’s one of the big reason why I always start any design with the copy first, not the UI or the fonts. I remember conversations I have had with product owners before that goes something like this:

“Don’t pay too much attention to the text, after…

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Sathyvelu Kunashegaran

I don’t know 99.9% of things out there, but the 0.1% that I do know — I am world-class at it. I intend to share it here.