UX Content updates for lower-effort improvements

The problem: Our booking pages for Babbel Live classes hadn’t been worked on since the launch of the MVP. The pages were text-heavy but still unclear; the headers were vague and the subheaders went to two lines on mobile. No content design work had been done because a comprehensive redesign of the pages was planned for later in the year. We all knew the pages needed work, but it was too low on our backlog to tackle right then.

The solution: When the team prepared to implement a small change to the pages, I suggested including a stop-gap fix for the headers, subheaders, and body copy of the page, cutting as much text as possible and re-writing what was there with more active and intentional language. To make the copy more precise and actionable, I created different headers for different states of the page, depending on whether the class was booked or unbooked.

How we got there: Strategizing with the product designer on how best to get buy-in for copy changes along with the current initiative, I pitched content as the simplest change to make. After the PM agreed to the changes, I explored various options in Figma to see which headers were most engaging. Then I worked closely with the localization team to make sure all the headers in all our display languages would fit on a single line on mobile.

The challenges: Since I’d suggested the content changes as a stop-gap solution, I had to keep the team’s work minimal, promising that the only required engineering effort would be opening a pull request. The product designer and I really wanted to move forward with more comprehensive changes, but we forced ourselves to work within the agreed-upon constraints and waited another quarter before we could tackle the full redesign. 

The biggest win: Convincing the agile team that UX content changes were a relatively low-effort lever to pull, while also making sure everyone understood that updated copy couldn’t solve the larger problems.