TAPP treats the citizen's first bus-riding experience as important, but that alone is not enough. Through forming a relationship with citizens, it must get them to re-use the bus and to back the TAPP transit system. So it has to build a virtuous cycle of tightly connecting and reconnecting with passengers.
This cycle starts with the organization drawing the citizen's attention ([Figure 1-1]). Then the citizen must be converted into a bus user. Since the transit system is not a simple purchase but an experience, citizens must be made to experience transit. To do this, boarding must first be induced. That is, through onboarding*, the citizen gets connected to the experience of transit.
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The virtuous cycle of experience
Research (attention) -> Validate, convert (conversion) -> Prepare (onboarding)
Use (connection) -> Rupture, decision (support) -> Preference, advocacy (transformation)
At the starting point of the cycle, what draws the citizen's interest in the bus is marketing content. Through marketing content, the citizen researches and focuses on whether the riding experience fits them. Traditional marketing that spreads through Twitter, blog posts, SNS posts, press releases, and ads belongs here. Magazine articles, on-site reviews and product ratings, and in-app-store product listings are also included.
*Research
- Ads/articles, email campaigns/product listings, Twitter & SNS posts
- For users checking whether the experience fits them, traditional marketing content — ads, product listings — is useful. Such content serves the organization's goal of capturing user attention.
Once the user is aware of the experience, they can verify whether it fits them. The user consults content — product promos, purchase reviews, product ratings — to decide whether to download the TAPP app and ride the bus (or, for another experience, whether to purchase or download the software). That content
helps the user move to the stage of executing the experience. Once the user executes the experience, marketing has arguably fulfilled its role. But running the experience requires setup, and at this point the user needs to know how to start the first step. This is where UX content begins.
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People may forget what you said, but they will never forget the emotion they felt in that moment. — unknown
Humans interact, are influenced, and remember the emotions tied to their experiences for a long time. Organizations that deliver experiences want users to remember the emotions they felt through the experience. Through those emotions, the user recognizes, sustains, and distinguishes the experience from other experiences offered by competitors. Voice is the set of traits that lets content create such emotions.
As we saw in Chapter 1, organizations use content across the entire relationship with the user. When the voice the experience delivers stays consistent across the virtuous cycle, closeness to the brand is strengthened. Users act with more trust toward the experience and organization they recognize. Conversely, if the content used in the organization's designed experience fails to reflect the user's emotion, the user feels a range of things — attachment, pushback, loyalty, disgust, confusion — and drifts away from the experience.
The biggest obstacle to consistency is the teammates who write the content. In large organizations, the people writing content may sit in different departments, or may not even know each other. But if the content holds a consistent voice, you can still pull out a unified voice across teams.
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Product principles
The base of a voice chart is the product principles. Product principles define the experience for the user. Voice then delivers those product principles through every single phrase.
Actually, defining a product's or organization's principles is usually not the UX writer's job. If the organization you currently work at has marketing or advertising support, they probably already have product or organizational principles defined. I only realized — after arranging phrases that matched the principles — that my goal is not to 'own' the product principles but to tune UX content to the principles already in place.
If the organizational principles haven't been defined yet, I recommend talking it over with colleagues.
