The voice of your product or community

imageSomething that’s never really discussed in the visual age is the voice of your product or Community.  Words are just as important as important as the visual design and layout.  The language of your product educates, informs, and sets the tone of the environment for the user. 

If your software sounds angry it might have an impact on the user perception.  On the flip side, every one of these e-mails has the potential to be an important customer touch… make it a good one.

I’ll pick on ourselves for a moment to demonstrate.  The following message is received by a user of Community Server 2008 when they are rejected by a group owner for membership…

From: EVOLUTION – Automated Email [evo(at)telligent.com]

Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 4:45 PM

To: Jason Alexander

Subject: [CS Core] Access Rejected

Your access request to the CS Core group (http://evolution.telligent.com/groups/cs_core/default.aspx) has been rejected.

You were sent this email because you had requested access to the CS Core group and that request has been rejected.

Does anything jump out at you?  If you said “Jason has been REJECTED… and must be a loser” then you spotted part of the problem.  Jason thought it was a little harsh too.  Yup, we’re dogfooding our upcoming CS Evolution product, running SCRUM, and Jason (although we love him) is a chicken in the process.  Although our group is open and Jason can read everything we didn’t want him to be using our group site as a venue for feedback, so we rejected his membership to participate.

You’ll be happy to know that in the next CS release we’re doing a full sweep of the e-mail templates generated by CS.  I’m told in CS 2009 we’ll be telling users “Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me”… which would be a big improvement.  If you are using CS today and want to look over our mail templates and change them… it’s the subject of today’s Tellitip. 

I’ll save you the jump and tell you that the templates are all in e-mails.xml in the Languagesen-USemails directory of Community Server.

What good and bad product voices have you seen?