I keep noticing how much my voice acting work rhymes with my product work at MLO Technologies. The booth and the codebase are weirdly similar disciplines — both are about delivering a clear, confident message inside someone’s head with the minimum friction. Five UX principles I stole directly from voice acting:

1. Pacing is the message

The reason a voice-over works isn’t the words — it’s the pauses. Same in UX: the white space, the loading state, the breath between actions. A button that responds in 80ms feels alive; the same button responding in 280ms feels broken. Pacing is the signal that something is being said with intention.

2. The first three seconds set the contract

In a voice booth, the first line of any read tells the listener: this is what you’re listening to and how you should feel about it. Same in product: the first three seconds on a landing page or inside an onboarding flow set the contract. If those seconds underdeliver, no amount of feature explanation later recovers it.

3. Audiences forgive imperfection, not inconsistency

A voice actor who breathes in the wrong place once is fine. The same actor whose pace shifts mid-paragraph is unlistenable. Users forgive bugs; they don’t forgive inconsistent UI patterns. Pick a system, hold the line.

4. Read the room — then read past it

Booth direction goes: “Read it more conversational.” Then: “Now even more conversational.” Always one step further than feels comfortable. UX is the same — the right amount of plainness, simplicity and warmth almost always feels like overshooting until you ship it. Then it’s exactly right.

5. The error path is the work

Voice actors spend 90% of their craft on the 10% of moments that have to be perfect — the emotional turns, the punchlines. UX designers spend 90% of their time on happy paths. Flip it. The error states, the empty states, the recovery flows are where users decide whether your product actually respects them. Nielsen Norman has been saying this for 25 years; we still don’t listen.

The deeper lesson

Both disciplines are about compression with care. Saying everything you need to say in less time, with more clarity, with the human still inside it. The booth taught me UX before I knew what UX was. If your craft is anywhere downstream of communication, you already have the training — you just have to translate it.

Building product and want a sounding board? Drop me a line.