This is part of the 15-day UX Writing Challenge presented by Daily UX Writing.
Challenge: Using the browser on your mobile device, please go to Facebook and log in. Tap the menu icon and then tap Create New Page in the Pages section.
Your task: Rewrite the page creation and user onboarding experience. Be bold and take risks.
Headline: 45 characters
Body: 100 characters
Button: 25 characters
Task & Goals
Facebook has over 1 billion users worldwide and is a hot spot for businesses, organizations, and brands to build and expand their online presence.
Suppose you’re a marketer and you’re tasked with expanding your brand’s presence on the site. Fortunately, Facebook has a Page feature where brands can create Pages where members can directly interact with them and get the latest updates, like the Daily UX Writing Page.
Since Facebook really cares about engagement and having as many brands as possible on their site, the members of the Page team have worked hard to ensure that creating a Page is as easy as possible.
Now let’s suppose that we’re part of the Page team that’s tasked with revising the Page creation guide and onboarding experience. Since we know that our stakeholders value engagement, our goal, as UX writers, is to recreate the guide so that it removes any obstacles that may decrease that desire level of engagement.
Concepts & Ideas
First, let’s look at Facebook’s current user flow and content copy for creating a Page:
This may seem daunting because of the numerous pages, but don’t worry. We’re going to tackle each page one by one. Think of them each as a UX Writing challenge.
Create your Page
Let’s start with Create your* Page:
*Note: The lowercase “your” in the title doesn’t sit well with me because something tells me that it should be capitalized. But without getting ourselves into a hole, this is a great opportunity to talk about style guides.
Every company that takes content design seriously will most likely have a style guide. For those unfamiliar with them, they’re guidelines for content designers and writers to abide by to ensure that content is consistent and aligns with the brand’s voice. Here’s an example: Apple’s Style Guide.
Facebook likely has a guideline where possessive pronouns in titles must be lowercase.
Every company is different, just be sure that your content is aligned with their guidelines. For this challenge, we’ll do our best to abide by Facebook’s style guide.
So, the first page is simply an introduction into what a Page is and invites the user to get started. The page looks fine but we can do better.
We want to excite the user about this feature and build strong momentum from the very start.
Here’s my copy:
Headline: Connect with your audience on Facebook
Body: Whether you’re a business, brand, or organization, Pages is free to set up and build your presence.
Button: Get Started
The title and button texts are perfectly fine. One issue that I had with the original text was that it felt impersonal and inconsistent with the title. The title explicitly uses “your” to connect with the user but suddenly talks about businesses and organizations as if Pages was meant for them, not the user.
So we changed the body to connect the two ideas. We know that Pages is for businesses, brands, and organizations, but let’s make it clear that we’re still talking to our user. By saying: “Whether YOU’RE a business, brand, or organization, Pages is free to set up and build YOUR online presence”, we’re directly addressing our user without ignoring our intended audience.
Give Your Page a Title
Okay, moving on to the next page in the user flow experience:
So, this page allows the user to create the title of their page. Page titles are important because it represents their brand’s identity. People use titles to find and recognize Pages, so we need to highlight this importance to our user.
Here’s the copy:
Headline: Give your Page a Title
Body: Help users find and identify your Page with a title that matches your brand.
Button: Next
Our goal is to condense the two bodies into one. In our new body, we managed to push our recommendation as well as the importance of matching Page title to brand name. In addition, since our hierarchy assumes that the user reads from top to bottom, it’s better to place this suggestion before the input field.
Tell Us About your Page
Our next step asks the user what their Page is about. The user is asked to categorize it to give other users, who may be unfamiliar with their brand, some idea about their Page.
Here’s my copy:
Headline: Tell us about your Page
Body: Pick a category for your Page to help people understand your brand. You can always update it later.
Button: Next
For the headline, I want to maintain a consistent tone. It seems odd that we change our tone from instructive to inquisitive. Since the previous pages were instructive, where we give instructions like “Create” and “Give”, it may be better to remain consistent with “Tell”.
Of course we don’t want to come off as robotic. But our job is to guide the user throughout this process; it makes sense to have an instructive tone.
For the body, I identified the main points as:
- Categories help people better understand the Page
- The categories can always be updated
So, in our body, we highlighted these two points and how they connect to the Page overall.
Add your Website
It’s important that brands can add their own website because it can drive traffic to there. We should highlight this importance but acknowledge that it isn’t necessary if they don’t have one.
Here’s my copy:
Headline: Add your website
Body: Drive traffic to your website directly from your Page. Or you can skip this step and add one later.
Button: Next
In the body, we highlight the benefit of having a website on the Page but understand that the user may not have one at the moment. Similar to the previous step in the user flow, we assure them that they can always add one later.
Add a profile picture
According to the original copy, Pages with profile pictures rank higher in search results. It’s also important to convey to the user that appropriate profile pictures are visual representation of their brand and are essential to portraying legitimacy. We want to highlight these benefits to them.
I also want to address another issue. This is the last step before the user launches their Page for the public to see and follow. When I explored this process, I had no desire to create a Page other than to see the user flow and read the copies.
I had the expectation that I would arrive at a step that would explicitly tell me that I would launch my Page. That why I knew when the process stopped and be able to finish my exploration without actually creating a Page. But when I clicked on Next, I was surprised to see that my Page went live.
Therefore, we need to change the button text to tell the user that the following button will create their Page.
Here’s my copy:
Headline: Add a profile picture
Body: Add a photo to help users identify your brand. Your Page will also rank higher in search results.
Button: Add profile picture | Create Page
It’s strange that the body mentions cover photos but there isn’t a feature to add one. So in our copy, we removed that mention entirely. We also provided a couple of benefits to the user such as easier brand recognition for their audience and higher search result rankings.
The Change photo button text is vague. Firstly, change entails that something will be replaced. Also, it doesn’t specify whether they’ll add a profile picture or a cover photo. Since we removed any mention of cover photos, we changed the text to Add profile picture to be specific.
Lastly, the blue button text needs to be replaced. If the user reads Next, they’ll assume that there’s another step that follows. However, since this is the final step, it should be clear to the user that the button will create their Page. Hence, it’s ideal to change it to Create Page.
Here’s what the final user flow will look like:
Conclusion
While the original Facebook Page guide was good, it has room for improvement. Our process made the content more clear and provided a more consistent tone.
With that said, I want to proudly say that we did it. We finished the 15-day UX Writing Challenge! Thank you for reading this far and seeing my progress throughout each challenge. Your feedback and support is what helped me through this entire journey.
But this is far from the end. As a matter of fact, it’s just the beginning of my journey into UX Writing. Be sure to follow me for more content in the future.
As always, if you have any feedback for me, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’d also love to hear how you would tackle this challenge!
