In my almost 8 years of technical writing I have not been that involved in creating and maintaining user interface (UI) strings. I’ve only ever been asked to review and edit UI strings, but never asked to create them from scratch. I’ve created online Help, I’ve created context-sensitive online Help, administration & installation guides, user guides, release notes, quick reference notes, and style guides, but never UI strings.

Interesting.

What’s even more interesting is that my current employer’s software has some of the longest UI strings I have ever seen in a piece of software. I’m used to short strings, button and field labels, but these are 3- and 4- line long descriptions, calls-to-action and explanation of benefit. It’s not only challenging to write from a creative/writing perspective, but it’s challenging because most of the time we don’t know what the character limits are, so we have no idea how verbose or terse we’re supposed to be! Half the time I feel like we’re working in a Twitter-like restrictive area, in that we’ve only got 140 characters worth of space to write up a call-to-action, other times I feel like I’ve got 15 lines worth of space in the UI. Very odd sensation, and you would think that it would be liberating, however I find the contrary to be true.

Handcuffed.

That’s how I feel sometimes as I try to craft the perfect group of sentences that efficiently and succinctly describe the benefits of using our Acme software, only to be told my the Engineering department that the character limit is 350 characters. And my boss tells me I still have to get all the benefit information in those 350 characters, as well as the call-to-action, and also the “what have you done for me lately” angle as well. *Phew*

And who thought tech writers couldn’t be creative?

I enjoy the challenge of coming up with these 350 character UI strings for our Acme software. I enjoy the challenge of trying to determine the benefit to the user clicking the Next button. Of trying to figure out how to get the user to click that Next button.

Copywriting meets tech writing in 350 characters or less.