Should Retail invest in UX Writing?

Retail has been passing through a digital transformation over those last years, changing the way customers interact and buy from them. The industry has reached a point where it can no longer depend only on the physical operation. As customers, we now buy online when we commute, at home, on Instagram, and even when we are physically inside a shopping mall, just to browse more about goods.

For a brick and mortar company, the whole user experience happens inside the stores. It is the face to face interaction with the customer, the displace of marketing campaigns and the accessibility of the product itself that rounds the experience. In this scenario, we need a strong sales, marketing, and product team, combined with a great operation that thinks about the store architecture, visual merchandising, and other subjects that complement the event in-store.

Why would retail need a UX Writer to communicate properly with their users in this situation?

The UX Writer could choose the right terms on displays, signs and printed materials, among other applications. However, the scope gets broader when they start going online and omnichannel.

I have been working with financial products for retailers for the past 7 years, and UX writing has been calling my attention since we have been more active on our APP. I started to face some situations that neither the marketing team nor the UX Designer could solve for us. I would launch a new feature, and the board would make that weird face when reading an interface. Not to mention our customers, that even though they had and interacted with our APP, they still called our phone to solve their problems. Why weren’t they understanding that what they needed to solve was right on the palm of their hands?

Maybe it was the way we delivered the microcopy (a little piece of text on the interface) to our users. Without user experience writing, we were just helping users to learn about our product and try it and not thinking of delivering the best experience.

The use of words shouldn’t be placed to make your product look more attractive, but to communicate with your users and get them to do what they need.

Without fancy words.

Without long texts and explanations.

Without technical terms, that you, as a business person, are used to and comprehend, but your mother doesn’t.

For the past years working with financial products on retail has been an interesting challenge for me. The education on that matter is so poor and the industry has been delivering such an ungrateful experience, that people couldn’t understand what they were authorizing.

Hopefully, UX professionals are increasingly showing their value and being more relevant to client-centred companies. This new role of UX Writer combines different skills, such as linguistics, research, data visualization, librarianship. Hard to find, hun? But necessary if you want to be crystal clear when communicating with your customer, even in Retail.