Don’t throw your app into a corporate-speak wasteland
Only a few weeks ago I touched on how app companies can glean design and UI inspiration from their rivals. My argument is that there is nothing wrong with using established design principles and customer behaviours to enhance your own app offering. Other companies clearly do this. It’s easy to spot. What I’ve also started to notice is that it isn’t just the design styles that is being cloned.
Bland corporate copy… everywhere!!
Apps are starting to ‘sound’ the same. The same copy used. The same workshopped, focus group-approved wording. The bland corporate jargon. The digital equivalent of “your call is important to us” or “we apologise for any inconvenience”. It’s just bollocks. There is no sincerity behind it.
Terms and Conditions, returns policies, privacy policies, FAQs. All of them sound like they were written by a robot. Or as if the jobbing legal consultant running late on a deadline, copied all the text from another app and ran a find and replace to drop your corporate name in the correct places.
It feels lazy. And a bit cheap. And something of a cop-out. Why go to all those lengths to build up your brand, include visual branding throughout your app and then just settle for dull corporate speak copy everywhere.
A couple of weeks ago I spotted this brilliant article by Leif-Nissen Lundbaek. He talks about why we need to kill the standard privacy notice because it has evolved into unreadable dull legalese. And I couldn’t agree more. But I think we should go a step further. Most companies these days have huge branding guideline bibles. They have an official ‘tone of voice’. They’ll have paid someone a whole heap of money to come up with this stuff. So we re-wrote our privacy policy and T’s and C’s in our own voice. Albeit with slightly less swearing.
We even included an Easter Egg. A delicious one.
There is hope out there
Thankfully though, not every app developer out there has fallen into this trap yet. Some are blazing a glorious trail of destruction, fun and absolutely mad-cap copy.
Last week I downloaded a weather app that prompted me to enable a profanity setting. Yep. I downloaded a sweary weather app. And I’ve been raving about it ever since.
It doesn’t need to be sweary. It doesn’t need to be different. But it doesn’t need to be boring. After all, being British I love a moan about the weather. Even when it is 27 degrees, lovely sunshine, aqua-blue skies and way too bloody hot!
Be like Carrot Weather. Don’t be like the rest of the herd.
Thom Gibbons is CEO of Apptaura. His team build bloody brilliant apps for exceptional businesses. Fuelled by code, caffeine and confidence Apptaura are on a mission to shake up the app development game and make it fairer, better and less of a shitty experience for entrepreneurs and small businesses with big ideas.
