Today we're sharing our interview with Morane Touati. We talked with her about conversion, e-commerce journeys, tone of voice, and what artificial intelligence is doing to language.
The right words, at the right time, in the right place, in the right tone
Conversion Club — Hello Morane, can you introduce yourself quickly?
MT – Happy to! I've been a UX Writer and Content Designer for eight years.
In broad strokes, it means this: in products and interfaces, putting the right words at the right time, in the right place, in the right tone. Our interfaces, whether they're websites, apps, or even voice interfaces today, are containers. I handle the content, meaning what people find along that journey. I pay particular attention to what we call microcopy: those small words that have a huge influence on how well the user experience holds up.
Beyond that, I co-founded WordsMatter three years ago, the first agency in France 100% dedicated to this.
It's a bit of a crazy project, because people often tell us: "words aren't our priority."
Three years later, we've mostly become a Qualiopi-certified training organization. We still do client work, but we also run a lot of in-house training, to help internal designers harness the power of words and understand it better.
What I often say is that UX Writing or Content Design, when you train in it, aren't disciplines that teach you how to write.
They teach you to think about content systemically.
That's essential in user experience, and in digital more broadly. On a more personal note: I don't come from design at all. I have a master's in philosophy. Today, I'm catching up, at a time when we all need to ask ourselves a lot of questions about our design methods.
I'm working on a key topic in particular: the anthropomorphism of AI models.
I work on the personality of these models, and it raises real questions. We know we can help by creating conversational interfaces, and at the same time we blur the line between human and machine. We shouldn't fully merge...
Today, everything is about results
Conversion Club — How do you actually measure that impact?
MT – What's interesting is that today, we know the value of UX Writing. We see numbers on engagement and conversion. But it's still fuzzy, because teams don't necessarily have access to data. That's exactly the problem when we join teams for an engagement: they ask us, "what results can you guarantee?"
I started in late 2018, early 2019, just as UX Writing was gaining a place in France. Back then, we had to do a lot of evangelizing. Today, when I ask the question at the start of a class in higher education, I see a lot of raised hands.
That evangelizing work is done. On the question of results, though, it still isn't.
It all depends on whether the company is willing to invest in testing.
Let me share a concrete example from when I was on assignment at Française des Jeux. I was one of their first UX Writers, and they had run a test on a small banner in their mobile app, meant to promote a game option. They first tried a purely graphic variation, going from a midnight blue to a slightly more golden yellow, which worked fairly well. But it didn't hit their goal, so they said: "let's move on to the content."
The team's initial enthusiasm was fairly limited:
"Nobody's going to read it, users won't see the difference."
So we tested two content variations, and one stood out in particular. After sixteen days of A/B testing, we ran the numbers.
Projected over a year, it meant an extra €800,000 in revenue, from that small banner alone. From then on, we gave content a bit more room.
Conversion Club – Do you distinguish between word choice and content architecture?
MT – Microcopy is never isolated.
You always have to consider the emotional state of the user behind the screen. In my example, the user had to check a box that would add an extra euro to their cart.
It's a tense moment, and they need to understand they're not throwing that euro away.
What I often say about journeys is that there's one very simple thing to do: on certain screens, add a small indicator that reflects what the user is likely feeling at that moment. Not necessarily on every screen, but at the pivotal moments. When you think through this architecture with the whole journey in mind, you can make better and better micro-level choices.
That's the real difference between writing words and doing UX Writing.
→ Read on the Club:
Jérémie Werner
A gold mine nobody ever opens
Conversion Club — When you face an interface to audit, what's your first instinct? Do you start by mapping the whole journey, or do you know where friction naturally concentrates and go straight there?
MT – My first instinct is to go find what I call the gold mine: support.
We don't think about it enough, but that's where a lot of content-related pain points surface. The "I don't understand exactly what will happen when I click here," the "what does this term mean," the "I don't understand this message."
So one of my first steps is to connect with the support team, collect verbatims if possible, sort them, and see what can be quick wins right away.
When users contact support, it's generally about what annoys them.
Next: the internal documentation and the glossary, to better understand the product's vocabulary and how terms are used. Then, if there are UX researchers, check in with them on the most painful areas. And only then, dive into the journey itself.
What often comes first in an e-commerce journey is onboarding.
Onboarding is the first meeting between you and your user. Imagine it's like going to meet your date: you walk up, and those are the first words exchanged. Usually, it's a bit neglected. We throw in a couple of words, thinking "nobody will read it anyway."
Yet it's the moment when everything is decided.
→ Read on the Club:
Robin Marzin
Empty states, CTAs and forgotten areas of the journey
Conversion Club — After several years of auditing interfaces, do you see recurring patterns, areas you consistently find on e-commerce sites that don't work? Do you work with CRO teams?
MT – On patterns, yes. There's literature explaining that certain micro-content follows rules that work for users: CTAs, empty states, notifications.
There are good practices to apply, but what I think is that the real thorn in the side today isn't so much the copy itself on the screens. Copy is "easy to improve."
It's more the processes behind it, the ones set up to let the copy be challenged.
Writing is very sensitive. You're surrounded by people for whom all of this is very subjective, and who will say, "well, I would have written it differently." As an expert, you never make a decision out of pure subjectivity: it's always backed by data, whether it's research you produced or that UX researchers did. Even better, a combination of both.
The structural problem is treating the people who handle content as filler. You have your fixed screen and you come in to drop content on top of it.
The challenge is to bring content thinking in much earlier in the process, not at the end of the chain.
On e-commerce in particular, I recently worked with a cosmetics brand that sells beauty boxes. A large part of their business is e-commerce, and we realized that in the back office, in the logged-in customer area, all the empty zones, all the empty states, were extremely generic. They did absolutely nothing to drive action. And that action could be completing a profile, interacting, or maintaining the connection with the platform.
Empty states are exactly that: the balance between the autonomy you give users to navigate the platform and the guidance you give them through microcopy.
You have to take them by the hand a little in some places.
Make use of those empty zones, especially in the back office, to build a connection and encourage users to take certain actions.
And on copy consistency, the thing that comes up most often: inconsistent CTAs. A "Validate" here, a "Confirm" there, a "Save" elsewhere, for exactly the same mechanic.
The audit exercise is to pull every CTA out of the journey and compare them side by side. The problems show up within minutes.
→ Read on the Club:
Jérémie Werner
→ Also read:
Jérémie Werner
Tone of voice always ended up in the fridge
Conversion Club — How do you work on tone of voice so teams truly adopt it?
MT – It's a very frustrating subject. I feel like at the beginning, there's collective excitement. When you run your workshops to design the tone of voice, everyone's in, subjectivity always creeps in, but everyone is inspired. Then, once it exists, it's hard to spread.
What I've observed is that companies don't necessarily want an in-house UX Writing expert anymore. They want an assistant. There's now often a cloud with an AI skill running: after all, it has the tone, it has the guidelines, "it can do everything a UX Writer could do."
So tone of voice has become central again for many teams that needed it to generate microcopy. AI put tone of voice back at the center of the discussion. But maybe we're the ones who failed, because we didn't diversify how we present it.
Over time and through different experiences, I realized that tone of voice always ended up in the fridge. You have to treat your teams as users.
I gave myself the mission of diversifying how I present tone of voice. Open a slot in the calendar, a monthly hour for tone of voice discussion, come if you want. Make a short video capsule. With some people it has to be more playful: games, concrete before-and-afters. With others, a more serious presentation, a case study, an event, and so on.
I no longer want to leave my tone of voice in a static PDF that nobody opens, except me now and then to update it.
I also don't want it reduced to a skill in a cloud where it doesn't evolve anyway.
The question is: how do I give it back a place and visibility for everyone, and so importance for everyone?
By diversifying how you present it, you get many more ways to make people understand why tone of voice matters.
Conversion Club – And what about active microcopy, in newsletters, email flows and reminders: is tone of voice a driver there too?
MT – Yes, and it's an especially interesting area, because it's where a brand often has the most freedom of expression. The product journey is constrained by UX standards.
Email, on the other hand, is a conversational space. Tone does much more there.
Paradoxically, it's often where teams apply editorial guidelines the least rigorously, because it's seen as "marketing," not "product."
→ Read on the Club:
Robin Marzin
I know I can help make an AI more human, and it freaks me out.
Conversion Club — You work on the personality of AI models. Can you tell us what excites you about it, and what worries you?
MT – I'll start with what scares me, and end on the positive.
What worries me is more what I hinted at in the beginning: the emotional, affective relationship we're starting to have with these models, which runs through just one thing I'm responsible for: language.
Something like introspection for the designer happens here. You ask yourself: am I sure I want to design this?
Because designing a personality or a way of expressing yourself in a static product is different from doing it in a 100% conversational product, where the only interaction is this back-and-forth of questions and answers that, in my daily life, I only experience with human beings.
It's very strange to have that kind of relationship shifted onto the machine.
A few months ago, there was the "Keep 4o" movement, around an OpenAI model that has since disappeared. That model was especially loved by some people who felt understood by it. You know you can create that feeling of being understood through the kindness you put into your words, in the spaces where people open up and let out their pain. There's a very virtuous side to working on AI personality.
But on the other side, there's the far more worrying counterpart: what I call the "mirror tone." What I say, the AI echoes back to me, ping-pong style. So I can easily create dependence and come to see this artificial intelligence as a human. That's where it gets difficult for me.
On a more optimistic, cheerful note, I've heard a lot of alarmist talk like: "AI will replace me," "it's the end of writing."
But for many people, AI has also been a way to express their creativity and educate themselves. For example, my father is 65 and he's crazy about computers. But he never worked in tech, he was a railway worker. Since AI emerged, he's been learning to code at his own pace, and I think that's great.
In my training sessions, I've also heard from people passionate about history who don't have time to dive into textbooks and use AI to learn. With hallucinations as the obvious safeguard, of course, but when it's done well, it can work.
And another thing: for many people, AI has become one of the only regular points of contact with well-written words.
The answers it gives are free of spelling mistakes. Even if you skim, the content is built properly. I even believe that over time it could improve how people phrase their questions, and from a spelling standpoint, it could have a beneficial effect.
What I think is important is to commit to nurturing your creativity through other means at the same time.
Creative writing, for example, to keep seeing that you can produce something with a soul. AI can help me on certain targeted points. But alongside that, keep writing, thinking, and phrasing things yourself.
→ Read on the Club:
Jérémie Werner
Take a journey, sit down, and look only at the content.
Conversion Club — One last piece of advice for e-commerce teams that have never worked on their UX Writing. Where should they start?
MT – The first exercise is simply to step back.
Pick a high-stakes journey: sign-up, checkout. Pull it out of its overall context. Tell yourselves: "today we sit down and look for blockers tied only to content." Focus on content and nothing else, even though everything is always interdependent. Already, if you think carefully about the content in that journey, it can pay off. You just have to take the time to really look at it.
On that journey, the basic exercise: aren't there three different labels for the same buttons? A "validated" here, a "confirmed" there, a "saved" somewhere else, when they all do the same thing.
That's the first diagnosis you can run with no budget and no dedicated tool.
Another thing I'd add for e-commerce in particular: think about categorization.
The analogy I often use is the supermarket. I walk into a Super U I don't know, and I'm on vacation. How do I find my way? There are patterns, landmarks I know, because one supermarket looks like another. You have to think about signage, the signs above the aisles.
On an e-commerce platform with lots of category entry points, it's the same logic. Categorization is that signage. It has to guide the user who's discovering the store.
Conversion Club – One last thing: do you have any resources to recommend to our readers?
MT - Oh yes, happily! Two resources come to mind if you want to go further:
UX Content Collective: a library of English-language resources on UX Writing and content design. Articles, videos. One of the most complete entry points to the discipline for anyone who wants to understand it or build skills.
Uxcel: a platform that catalogs patterns by type of micro-content (CTAs, empty states, error messages). Handy for quick audits and as a reference for what works well.
Thanks to Morane Touati for this interview. If you want to follow her work, find her on LinkedIn.
WordsMatter coaches and trains in-house teams in UX Writing, Content and Conversational Design.
