bose bills itself as a research company that happens to make audio products. i worked in two capacities: first as a technical writer, documenting the precise specifications for a suite of consumer electronics products; and as a ux copywriter for those products’ accompanying apps.
the challenge
we’ve all been there—you know your shiny new toy comes with tons of cool features, but getting them set up or figuring out how to use them can be a pain. how could we write instructional copy in a way that was meaningful to a global audience, regardless of their technical expertise?
my solution
i employed what i call “the gigi test”, named after my beloved grandmother who (no offense, gigi) is not very tech savvy. any tutorials or how to guides had to be written in a way that she would understand quickly—that is, without too much jargon and without causing cognitive overload.
this was no easy task. i often received instructions from engineers and technical experts who were well-versed in the subject and had to work backwards through their knowledge to arrive at copy your average joe (or gigi) could understand.
working with the senior members of the team, i revamped bose’s branding and voice guidelines to be friendly, conversational, and helpful. this change cascaded all the way from onboarding messages to our release note copy to be more casual and more vernacular while still making sure users were getting the most out of their products.
in the example below, i created troubleshooting text to reduce the amount of calls to customer support regarding a feature where users could add custom radio stations to the app.
additionally
i was also in charge of managing translations, which were handled by a third party vendor. this included handling reports from qa testers who detected errors in a variety of languages, most of which i did not speak and had little familiarity with. in one example, testers reported several errors where the translators had mistakenly inserted periods into sentences in romanian (e.g. cum doriți să conectați difuzorul dvs. soundtouch la rețeaua dvs.?)
after a little research, i discovered it wasn’t a typo, but an abbreviation for the formal version of the word “your” in romanian—”dumneavoastră“. the more you know!
emotional language. 