Tag: user expectations

I’m at Write The Docs EU today in Budapest and will post semi–unpolished notes from sessions throughout the day after each talk finishes.

Most Important Thing: Reinforce your brand’s voice, but don’t make it sleazy.

How do you want your users to feel about you?

Tone can also:

• communicate your intended audience.
• communicate your expectations for how they will (or might) interact with your product.
• indicate the level of interactivity you’re willing to maintain with your clients or users.

Be willing to make updates or changes.

Communicating audience expectations

• skill level
• level of investment
• individuals or organizations
• commercial or non–commercial

Common problems with user expectations and tone

• Misjudging your audience.
• Limiting your audience through tone of the wrong level.
• Writing for yourselves, rather than your users.
• Using culturally limited references can exclude potential users.

Setting expectations with tone.

Level of Creativity

• What kind of limits, if any, do you want to set?
• Do you expect user to confirm to a level of professionalism or a specific niche?
• Are you inviting them to try and break something?

Aspirations for Users. Encourage ten to do more.

Challenges in Setting Expectations for use through tone

• Setting too narrow a scope for expectations is going to limit your more creative potential users
• Setting too wide a range of expectations for your users is going to panic lower–level users.
• Trying to set multiple levels of user expectations can get messy.

Setting communication expectations

Setting the tone for interaction

• What kind of resources are you making available for user support?
• Are you building a community?
• How accessible do you want to be to your users?
• What level of transparency are you aiming for?
• Public or private communications?

Examples:

• She’s a fan of Buffer because of their tone. For example, their “Questions & Problems” section. Echoes their brand awareness and transparency.
• Ember.js also has great tone and documentation.
• Wikipedia
• CoffeeScript. Their branding is their documentation. Not as accessible. Not very much comforting language, or a personal connection.

When is it important to divorce from your branded tone?

• When your audience for documentation and main products diverge.
• When the branded tone is inappropriate.

Example:

• Yelp has a distinct, happy branded voice. Very cheerful, bouncy, yet patronizing. Their developer documentation is dry.

Divorce or dilute?

• Facebook has a unique branded voice. “Hey, we’re Facebook, we have your family!” Documentation is slightly watered down to break out of the Facebook stalker bits.

Takeaways:

• Who are my users?
• What do I expect them to be doing?
• How much interaction do I want to promise?