voice & tone & UX, Oh my!

People naturally attribute human characteristics to the products, brands and content they encounter in daily life. This is great because it gives creators an opportunity to subtly set the stage. A well-defined and consistent voice tells the audience (customers, readers, partners or whomever you have identified) what to expect from the product or experience while tone helps the audience interpret context (is this suggested? required? urgent? for fun?) As experience designers, it is important to craft these aspects of the experience just as thoughtfully as we craft the form, function and visual aesthetics of a given product.

44 words that describe tone

WHAT ARE VOICE AND TONE?

Voice is the style, point of view, and personality of the speaker. Its characteristics stay constant across modes of communication. Think of the voice as who is talking. Tone on the other hand, is the subtle expression of a unique voice. It is contextual and emotional and it can change based on audience, situation or medium. To whom is the character speaking? What mood are they in? Are they sliding into DMs or Zooming with their co-workers? Tone is how it’s said.

FOR EXAMPLE, a fleet fox?

Let’s take a favorite sentence of typographers (and typists!) everywhere and apply several voice and tone treatments.

Rashomon baby! Or, why point of view matters.

VOICE is who is talking; TONE is how it’s said.

practice

Now let’s look at some first lines from literature. These usually employ a strong, deliberate tone of voice to set the stage and draw the reader in to the story. In the following examples, think about: Who is speaking? To whom? What do you know about this person so far? What mood (tone) is conveyed?

1/ Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

2/ It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

3/ Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

4/ Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel  Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Attributions and my answers are at the bottom of this post.

in practice - voice and tone in product design

While voice and tone have traditionally been associated with the written word, they are equally applicable to other facets of product design. This is fortunate since it can be difficult to establish a distinct textual tone and voice when you’re working with microcopy. In the emerging XR space, especially, much copy is between 3-10 words (buttons, labels, controls, hint text.) Longer copy tends to be reserved for error conditions (troubleshooting) or instruction (tutorial, OOBE) that not every customer will see.

This is why it’s particularly important that tone of voice be expressed throughout the product: Copy, Sound, Motion and Visual cues need to be well-aligned.

First lines answers

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God - My tone adjectives: confident, provocative, full of possibility.

2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar - My tone adjectives: Ominous, depressed, hypervigilant.

3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick - Second line, actually. If you’ve read this far, you’ll know “Call me Ishmael” is the iconic first. My tone adjectives: Meandering, indirect, expansive.

4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude - My tone adjectives: Sentimental and matter of fact, complicated.