caSe sensiTive

eBay shows us how easy it is to help the user. No extra copy needed here, just a couple of upper case letters to demonstrate to the hazy what case sensitive means.

Being irreverent with copy and perhaps disregarding a style guide is somewhat of a theme with microcopy. Without condescending to the user, one can include down to Earth copy that people can understand.

case sensitive microcopy

via amishrobot on Flickr

Never shared, never spammed

Memonic, a note-taking app, puts the registrant at ease by being pretty bold with its email address field (see more tips here). Whilst ‘never shared’ might be taken for granted by good marketers when asking for email addresses, the user is less than sure.

Of course, one has to make sure this message sits well with other fields. If you also ask users if third parties can get in touch, then this might conflict with the ‘never shared’ message.

Overall though, it’s great to re-assure users like this, as long as you back it up with action.

neevr shared email fields

via https://www.flickr.com/photos/greenbird_ontree/

Lots of best practice from Basecamp

basecamp signup

Easy to remember, hard to guess

As much inventive prompting as possible to get users to set a secure password is worthwhile, especially if you can do it like this, without interrupting the UX.

No credit card required

Possibly the most important four words for companies offering a truly free trial. There is no psychological barrier, especially in B2C, as big as thinking a company is going to charge you ad-hoc, or that you’ll forget and be silently charged.

Last week X [customers] signed up with us

Arguably not microcopy, but the subtlety, confidence and transparency in a statement like this is what microcopy is all about. It does no harm to a sign-up page to give the impression of recency by pulling in numbers like this.

These pages are often so static and boring that a statement like this (and a funky illustration – see Vine below) really perks things up.

(more field and form design tips here)

You can change this whenever

Brilliant from Tumblr. If there’s one way to increase the number of blogs created on their platform it’s to put the user at ease and inculcate them from day one with the spirit of free experimentation.

tumblr microcopy