The most important type of word in UX Writing

Prepositions make a world of difference.

Courtesy of Hal Gatewood at Unsplash

When I first started in UX, I was at an interview and took a few tests to determine if I had the necessary experience (spoiler alert: I didn’t).

I remember one part of the test said:

We built a timeline feature to help people see their work. Write a tooltip about how you’d describe this to them.

I wrote:

Track your work using our timeline feature.

Looking back, that was a terrible line. In fact, I think most of what I wrote on the test was pretty terrible.

Part of the reason why it was so terrible is that it was missing an important part of speech: a preposition.

Why are prepositions so important?

The problem in the digital space is it’s hard to communicate something has changed. Since there’s no physical, tangible process to purchasing clothes, transferring money, or completing an action online, how can someone know an action is complete?

That’s where prepositions come in.

They’re important because they tell you how someone is interacting with and moving around an object. For example:

• The man walked around the tree
• The man climbed up the tree
• The man climbed down the tree
• The man climbed inside the tree

Although you don’t know certain details about the man and the tree, the prepositions help you picture what’s going on.

Prepositions in UX

Prepositions in UX writing are important because they give you a sense of physical movement and help you place where everything is at. When you’re on a screen, they reinforce the idea that you’re still interacting with physical objects.

Below, I took 3 common UX phrases and first wrote them with a preposition. Then, I wrote them without a preposition to show the difference they make. The fourth phrase is a bonus showing how I should have written the line from the test.

In every case, you could use either sentence, but the prepositions increase the descriptiveness of each sentence by giving us a sense that something moved from one place to another.

1. Into: Tells you that the item is moving from outside an object and will be enclosed in something else.
2. Within: Tells you that your images are gathered and housed together.
3. Across: Tells you files are moving from one area to another side.
4. Along: Tells you that your tasks are placed together and moving in a linear, horizontal and consecutive order.

Recap

If I’m using a banking app, I’d prefer to receive a notification that says, “Huzzah! Your money has been moved into your account.”

I prefer it because into gives me the simple but enjoyable image that my money has moved from point A to point B–the movement makes me feel like I used the app to actually accomplish something.

Apps that don’t use prepositions leave me feeling somewhat dissatisfied because it doesn’t give me an image of movement and therefore I don’t feel like I accomplished anything.

The ultimate idea at work here is responsiveness. We do everything we can to make the UX/UI design respond and react to users with sounds, color and micro-interactions. Prepositions are what make UX writing responsive.