It Only Takes a Minute

Published 19 October 07 by Justin French

Next week, amongst many other far more interesting things, RedBubble will be rolling out a small change asking our artists to specify the currency in which they wish to be paid.

We started out just using their browsing preference (“show me prices in USD”), but it turns out that if they change this along the way, it creates major accounting headaches which we’d rather not write software to dance around right now (bigger fish, etc).

So, the solution is a browsing preference (change it as often as you like) and a payment preference (can’t be easily changed).

Xavier could have easily pushed it out the door with some dry “cannot be changed” text, but it only took him a few seconds longer to go the extra mile and make that text a little warmer, informative and personal:

“Which currency would you like to be paid in? For reasons only our accountant understands, this cannot be changed after you have set it.”

Copywriting is Interface Design, and I think it’s really important that teams are encouraged to inject a little bit of their own personality and natural language into their work wherever possible.