Business Tech

Improve your UX design with copy docs

“Copy docs stem from the advertising world, where they’re typically called copy decks. A copy doc is a single document created in a word-processing tool like Microsoft Word, Dropbox Paper, or Google Docs. It holds all the copy for a single project: a landing page, a series of mobile screens, a set of onboarding emails, or anything else.”

How to improve your design process with copy docs (Dropbox Design)

Something that’s irks me to no end is when I see product mockups or screenshots with filler text that makes no sense.

Text is just as important to the product experience as everything else (arguably even more important for things like dashboards).

If I’m drafting a product announcement or a guest post about a product, I don’t want the embedded screenshots or demo videos to have lorem ipsum filler fluff.

Enter copy docs.

Riffing from the source article:

“Many user experience writers (UX) and content strategists are familiar with design tools like Sketch, InVision, and Balsamiq. These are great resources for a team to share feedback on wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.

But what about the copy? How do you and your team decide on in-product copy to place in those wireframes, mockups, and prototypes? For many teams, the answer is something like, We copy and paste from an email or a Slack post. It’s scattershot, without a straightforward process. There’s no single place for copy iterations to live or get feedback, the way there is for design.

If this sounds familiar, your UX team could benefit from using copy docs. These are also known as copy decks, content templates, or copy platforms. A copy doc is a one-stop “source of truth” for all the copy in a project.”

I think copy docs are something that product marketers and product developers should jam on together. Why? Because if these designs are going to make an appearance in marketing assets, the text should fit the context.

E.g. if you’re going to use a scenario, telling a story about a fictional user trying to complete some task, the text in the example screenshots should feel like they’re part of that story.

By Andy
