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.
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.
via https://www.flickr.com/photos/greenbird_ontree/
Lots of best practice from Basecamp
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.
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