Lorem ipsum is a huge UX fail

"Let's do wireframes first, the copywriter can look at them and write the copy later."

It sounds reasonable. Design the thing, then fill in the words. Except in product design, it's wholly backwards – and it leads to problems that are expensive to fix.

Placeholder text blocks strategic design

When you wireframe with placeholder text and plan to drop copy in afterward, you're making structural decisions – how many steps in the flow, what goes on each screen, how much space a button gets – without knowing what the interface actually needs to say.

➡️ The layout gets locked before the message does. Then real words arrive, and they don't fit: buttons are too narrow, headlines get cut off, copy runs long and needs reworking again and again.

Worse, the designer never got the chance to use that copy to make better decisions – prioritising elements, shaping hierarchy, letting the specific context of the words inform the layout.

"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." – Jeffrey Zeldman, founder of A List Apart

Product copy isn't marketing copy

The deeper misunderstanding hinges on what product copy is. People often think of it as a marketing artefact, as brand voice applied to an interface. But the words inside a product are really the primary way users figure out what's happening and what to do next. ⬇️

• Button labels and CTAs
• Error messages
• Validation messages
• Onboarding steps and welcome flows
• Tooltips
• Empty states
• Confirmation screens
• Success messages
• Loading states and progress indicators
• Navigation labels and menu items
• Helper text and input hints
• Notification copy (in-app, push, email triggers)
• Permission requests (camera, location, notifications)
  

Marketing copy persuades someone to try your product. UX copy helps someone who's already inside your product accomplish what they came to do. One sells. The other guides. They need different thinking, different inputs, and different success metrics.

➡️ A word makes a world of difference

👀 There's a well-known example of this from Google.

In 2017, Maggie Stanphill, then a senior UX writer at Google, shared how her team changed a single button label in Google's hotel search from "Book a room" to "Check availability." No visual design change, a small shift of two different words. Engagement jumped 17%. The original asked for commitment from users who were still browsing, the new phrasing met them where they were – a fine example of interaction design done with language.

Airbnb does something similar: the line "You won't be charged yet" beneath their booking button exists purely to reduce anxiety at a specific moment in a user flow. Four words doing the work of a design pattern.

➡️ So what should you do?

The words in your product should be written during the design process, not after it. The designer should be inputting real copy into wireframes from day one – even if rough and imperfect. A writer can refine it later, but they need to refine something that was shaped by the flow.

"We'll get a copywriter to fill in the words later” = we're going to design the house and decide where the doors go after the walls are up. But really, the words aren’t the paint, they’re the floor plan.