The death, the intermission, and the copywriter.

Big things can happen on any given Monday.

::This post originally ran on my old Medium blog on June 25, 2013. I wrote it when I worked at a startup.::

Big things, like killing a project that absorbed much of your work life, can happen on innocuous days.

We’d worked on TodayLaunch, a social media inbox, for months. We planned it, made assumptions, and learned to talk about it. We wrestled with how to frame it, how to present it to potential users.

TodayLaunch was a social monitoring tool that functioned like an inbox. I used it every day and liked it. I assumed others would like it the same as I did. We used it on itself, and some of the tweets I read, as they trickled in, stung.

There were so many tools that called themselves a “social media dashboard” and few that referred to themselves as a “social media inbox.” That didn’t mean we had less competition, but that the users understood a different term better. A social media inbox was a different sell and to try to use the words users would naturally understand without actually using words that didn’t really describe the app wore me out. We were compared and found failing to products with more features, no matter if we insisted we were an inbox and not a dashboard.

As the copywriter, I wrote and rewrote, digging for the best language to use for the copy on the site and in my responses to users who had questions or needed some troubleshooting help. I tried to bend words in ways that would bring clarity to the inbox idea. I even wrote a poem, the 25 Days Of TodayLaunch, to humanize the app.

After a while, writing about it exhausted me.

“I have used up all adjectives,” I wrote in my personal journal one evening. “I don’t know how else to say what I don’t know I should be saying. You can’t tell someone that the sky is cerulean if they’ve always called it blue.”

In meetings, I listened and nodded my head as coding and development talk swirled around me, casually writing down words that repeatedly popped up. I discovered I could get great ideas in conversations that weren’t designated as “official” copy meetings where we’d strangely stiffen and stifle what we said. In a heated discussion on development and UI, natural words would spring to the top, and I realized sometimes our own casual language belied what we were insisting in our official copy.

“Our goal is to get our users in the habit of checking it with their morning coffee,” said one team member, justifying the placement of a nav bar. I wrote down habit: morning coffee and worried because I was a tea drinker.

“TodayLaunch needs a cue,” said another, pressing for an audible sound whenever new social content would arrive in the inbox. “We need to train the user to react to it.” Our whole team was fresh from reading Charles Duhigg’s book on habits. I wrote down cue: musical, habitual, pool table.

The copy was, like the app, a continual work in progress that died along with the app but not before I learned a few things about finding language when it didn’t want to be found.

At the time, I was involved with what I thought was the main show, but it ended up being intermission. I don’t mind.

It’s all part of the ticket price.