Voice and Tone

📚 Contents

Instructional voice and tone
1. Balance between friendly and informative
2. Writing for learning outcomes
First person and third person voice ← we use second person for talking to the students (you/we) and bringing them into stories and situations, and third person when telling stories about other people where we want to students to consider other people’s situations and experiences.
Tone changes depending on content type (Lesson vs HTG)

MITs - Most Important Tips

Designlab’s instructional voice follows these principles

Friendly, but not creepy
Approachable, but not amateurish
Helpful, but not fawning
Knowledgeable, but not patronizing

Content should be accessible to:

Students who may not have English as a first language. While students are expected to pass an English language test, at a minimum CEFR level of C1 , avoid use of western-centric idioms or metaphors
Neurodiverse learning styles. Providing diverse examples, images and mixed-media formats help reinforce learning
Students may have no background or experience in tech, or have no formal background in design
When making a comparison or providing historic background, include examples for visual context. Consider linking out complex details (ie. websites, books) for students to read on their own time.

Content examples

Example	Reason
🚫 Too formal
"As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human centred design disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as personas. ... When you create persona profiles of typical or atypical (extreme) users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research, which synthesises the types of people you seek to design for. ... Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against." (Interaction Design Foundation)	The way it's worded is overly complex; each of these sentences can be rephrased using more commonly used words. Try to avoid using technical terms to explain other technical terms. In this example, “Persona profiles” and “extreme users” are two UX terms that can be explained separately.
🚫 Too casual
"We can't just make decisions on our own as a design team! There's so much more to it! And we do that by doing our due diligence in research. So you basically have to make sure you talk to a bunch of people, understand the patterns, and then share it with your design team."	This is too conversational to the point where it seems accidental to use terms like "basically" in the sentence. Is it truly basic? Consider the student’s perspective, especially if they don’t have exposure to tech or design. Would that make them feel bad that they don't know it?
✅ Just right"Personas used in UX work are a quick, empathy-inducing shorthand for our users’ context, motivations, needs, and approaches to using our products. They are meant to help us focus on what matters most to our users and put ourselves in their shoes when making design decisions. Because of this, they must always be rooted in a qualitative understanding of users and reflect the what and why that drives them. They should not be based on (often dubious) correlations between different demographic or analytics variables." (Nielsen Norman Group)	The sentences are succinct and use an appropriate language level. They have a sense of command without being overbearing or intimidating.