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Tone of Voice: reviewing good examples and best practices

Ben Davies-Romano
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readMar 1, 2022

As a freelance UX Writer, one thing I’m often hired to do is help companies find the right tone of voice to communicate with their users throughout the product experience. More often than not, this leads to reworking the tone of voice higher up the funnel, beginning with the value proposition and marketing messaging to ensure consistency throughout the customer journey.

Part of finding the right tone of voice depends on research and asking questions like:

  • Who’s the target audience?
  • How would they describe this product in their own words?
  • What kind of language resonates with them?
  • How do they speak with their friends?

However, the other part is inevitably finding out what the company themselves envisage for their own tone. The easiest way for them to articulate this is by asking for examples.

So, here I’ve listed the 5 most frequently cited examples of aspirational tone of voice from my clients over the past year (bear in mind — I’m based in the UK). I’ve gone to each brand’s website and looked simply at the first screen, above the fold only. Here, I share my first impression of each, and hopefully learn a thing or two about tone in the process!

Innocent Drinks

Even though I work mainly with companies with entirely digital products or services, Innocent has come up more than a few times. And it makes…

Published in UX Collective

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Written by Ben Davies-Romano

UX, Product, Growth | https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-w-davies/ Leading content design at Klarna | Founder of Tech Outcasts | ☕️ and 🏳️‍🌈

Responses (4)

What are your thoughts?

There is this digital product on the App/Play store called CRED (you can look it up on Google), here in India. These folks are into reward based credit card payment services.
In a couple of years they have become the most talked about new age…

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i really laughed reading some of your sentences. this was an awesome read!
thank you for your insights - happy to share this !

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Great examples and resources! Much appreciated. I'm huge fan of Chipotle's content strategy, the right amount of quirk without impeding my user experience when ordering. :)

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