August 2025

Hey friend,

This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design.

I love reading books, but I hate reading copy in apps. And I know I’m not alone.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “users don’t read” before. It’s true -people skim long instructions or descriptions, and sometimes skip them altogether.

So the real question is: how do we actually get information across to users?

Here are a few approaches that have worked well for us.

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The low hanging fruits

Be less polite

Sometimes it’s ok to trade a little politeness for brevity. A confirmation like “Are you sure you want to delete this row?” can simply be “Delete row?”

Use acronyms, sometimes

If the context is clear and the shorthand is common, it works. For example, “1 week” can be “1W” or “50 points” can be “50 pts.” Just make sure people have enough cues to decode it instantly.

Clean up the visual hierarchy

Styling and spacing go a long way. Adjusting type, weight, or layout can make a block of content feel instantly more readable. This video explains it well​

A step up

Use hover states smartly

Hover can be a great way to tuck in extra explanation without overwhelming the main screen.

For example, Notion's users love its clean design. There are so many things you can do on a page, but the UI is never clustered and overwhelming.

One reason: smart use of hover states. Look at the screenshot below. When you hover on a menu icon, a short tooltip appears - highlighting the most common actions and hinting there’s more inside.

It's clever and to the point.

Use imagery

Icons help, but illustrations often do more work than paragraphs of text.

Take Wealthfront as an example.

They could have written a detailed line like, “gain long-term wealth by investing and saving, see your net worth at different milestones.”

Instead, they used a simple illustration that showed growth over time.

No lengthy sentence needed, just a visual that makes the concept click instantly.

Cut into steps

Sometimes, you really do need more words. In those cases, chunk them.

Lemonade shows how this works.

Their onboarding has a fair amount of text, but it’s written in a conversational style, split into short steps, and separated with clear dividers.

The result is something that feels more like a dialogue that’s easy to follow along.

Wrapping up

Words are part of design too. And the point isn’t to get people reading more, it’s to help them get it faster.

• Be succinct (shorter phrasing, clear acronyms)
• Let structure guide the eye (hierarchy, hover states, steps)
• Lean on visuals when words get heavy (icons, illustrations)
• Cut into steps
• And if something takes too many words, it’s usually a design problem, not just a copy one

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

Anyi & Andrea

Cofounders @ Koi Studios​

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