If you cannot explain your product, it is not a copy problem

One of the requests I get most often is some version of we need to improve the text on the home page, nobody understands what we do. Nearly every time I go and look, the problem is not the text.

When a sentence will not come out, words are rarely what is missing. What is missing is a decision nobody has taken yet, and the text is simply the first place that indecision becomes visible.

The sentence will not come because you have not chosen

Writing a clear sentence requires deciding three things: who the product is for, what specific problem it solves, and who you are leaving out. The third is the one nobody wants to take, and without it the other two stay at the level of generalities.

That is where the sentences that say nothing come from. The platform that connects teams with their data could describe two hundred different companies, and that is exactly its function: to commit nobody to any decision. It is a draw, set in good type.

Closing doors is vertiginous, especially when the project is yours, because every closed door looks like an opportunity you are giving away. But until you leave somebody out you do not have a product, you have an entire category still unspecified.

Interface text is the interface

There is an idea that carries a lot of weight in my work and took me a while to understand: the text in an interface is not an ornament applied at the end, it is the interface itself. Everything else is boxes around some words.

When the words are precise, a good part of the design settles by itself. If you know exactly what somebody has to understand in the first seconds, visual hierarchy stops being a matter of taste and becomes a consequence. If you do not know, no amount of visual work will fix it, because you will be arranging something that has not been decided.

How I test it

The test I use is simple. I explain the product to somebody in one sentence and ask them to give it back to me in their own words. If what comes back is right, the sentence works. If they have to ask me something before they can repeat it, the sentence is not there yet.

There is a second signal, less comfortable: if saying it a second time tires you, it is not the right one. You are going to repeat that sentence far more often than you imagine, to the people you want using it, to whoever works with you, and to whoever asks at dinner what you are up to.

What I do before opening any tool

I write down what somebody has to understand in the first seconds, and I write down who I am leaving out. Both in plain text, with no design involved, because design lets you postpone the decision and a sentence does not.

Drawing is pleasant, it looks good immediately and it feels like progress. That is why it is the favourite hiding place when the underlying decision has not been made.

Questions people ask about this

How do I write my product value proposition?

Start with who you are leaving out, not with who you want to attract. Once you are clear about who it is not for, the sentence for the people it is for practically writes itself, because it no longer has to work for everybody.

Why is my home page unclear even though the writing is good?

Because being well written and saying something are different things. Correct text that picks no specific reader reads easily and is forgotten immediately. Try asking somebody to repeat back what you do after reading it.

Should I hire a copywriter or fix this first?

A good writer is going to ask you the same questions I am asking here, and if you do not have the answers they will produce something correct and empty. It is worth taking the decision first, so the writing starts from something firm.