Nando's App - UX Writing & Microcopy
About the project
This is a speculative UX writing project exploring what happens when a brand's voice moves from marketing into product. Nando's is warm, cheeky, and surprisingly self-aware in its marketing, but like most food apps, its ordering experience uses neutral, interchangeable language. This project asked one focused question: what if every screen felt like Nando's actually wrote it?
Client:
spec work
Project details
The brief wasn't to redesign the app. It was to identify the moments where generic copy creates quiet friction: onboarding, payment failure, empty states, order confirmation, and rewrite them in a voice that feels like the brand, not a template.
Before writing a single line, I audited Nando's marketing copy, menu language, and social tone to map consistent voice patterns. Then I identified the highest-friction moments in a typical ordering journey and wrote multiple variants per screen, filtering for the balance of clarity and personality using a simple test: would a user still understand this immediately, without any surrounding context?
To ground the copy in a real user need, I built from a single persona: Jamie, a 24-year-old on their first Nando's visit, and a JTBD statement focused on ordering confidence without food anxiety: "When I'm at Nando's for the first time and my friends are ready to order, I want to know what's actually in each dish without having to ask, so I can feel confident I'm not accidentally ordering something that'll blow my head off." That constraint shaped every microcopy decision: clarity had to come before personality, every time.
Problem Statement
Brand voice stops the moment you open the app. Generic copy, plain error states, copy-pasted confirmations: language that could belong to any delivery app. For Nando's, that's a missed opportunity.
Four friction points drove the work: generic copy throughout (error messages, empty states, and confirmations interchangeable with any other food app; friction at key moments) unclear onboarding, payment anxiety, no reassurance when things go wrong; missed emotional beats - no personality during the moments users are most engaged; no sense of the brand - the cheeky, warm tone that defines Nando's marketing is absent the moment you try to order.
Key microcopy decisions
Onboarding - sets the tone immediately. Warm and brand-specific, so users know they're somewhere with personality before they've tapped anything.
Error state (payment failed) - empathy first, then clarity. Humour dialled back. Users in a stressed moment need reassurance and a clear next step, not a joke.
Empty basket - avoids the generic "Your cart is empty." Encourages action without pressure. Light enough to make someone smile, clear enough to move them forward.
Order confirmed - conversational and warm. Reduces post-order anxiety by confirming the handoff clearly. Feels like a real person told you, not a system.
Feature concept - Spice Roulette
The Spice Roulette feature started with a simple observation: choosing your heat level can feel like a commitment. But what if that moment of uncertainty became part of the fun? The user sets a spice range first, taps the card to spin, and the roulette lands on a level within their chosen boundaries - with a background colour shift and a suggested dish.
The critical UX decision: nobody ends up with Extra Hot if they didn't consent to the possibility. The fun is the surface. The safety is the structure underneath.
Thing I did
Mapped Nando's tone of voice from existing brand materials before writing any copy. Rewrote onboarding, error states, empty states, and confirmation screens with brand-specific microcopy. Applied core UX writing principles throughout: humour used sparingly in error states, explicit reassurance in payment flows ("you haven't been charged"), and an actionable next step on every screen regardless of tone. Concepted and wrote the Spice Roulette feature - a gamified heat-level selector that turns indecision into a brand moment, while keeping user safety as the structural logic underneath the fun.
