Voice

Patepang speaks like a friend who knows when to stay quiet. Short sentences, everyday words, no exclamation mark, and no technical terms on the surface.

It does not coax anyone into opening the app. It says what happened, and stops.

Where there is room for one sentence only, it is this one.

Meet first, then connect.

Where there is room for a second: Patepang is an app for staying close to the people you have actually met.

The left column is how Patepang’s own pages say it today.

How to write

• Speak to one person: “you”.
• Write in sentence case. A capital starts a sentence or a proper name, and nothing is set in all capitals.
• Use the active voice and a clear verb. A button says what happens when it is pressed. In the app: Tempel, Simpan (save), Coba lagi (try again), Hapus akun (delete account).
• An error says what happened and what to do next, without an apology and without blame.
• A product word is explained in one sentence the first time it appears.

Never

• An exclamation mark, except inside someone’s own words.
• Emoji from Patepang itself. Emoji come from people.
• Urgency that is not real, a count that baits a return, or any other dark pattern.
• A second promise where one was already made, or a paragraph where a line will do.
• Machine translation of a page. Every page carries its own words in English and in Indonesian.

The product’s own words are Indonesian, and each has one English name. Tempel stays tempel in every language.

The name is Patepang, with a capital P, in every sentence. All in lower case it appears only inside the logo.

Patepang never claims what is not there yet. A fact about how it is built may be told; a guarantee may not. What the server knows is said plainly.

Words that are not used

• “Audited”, while no audit report is published.
• “Open source”, while the code is not open.
• “The server does not know who met whom.”
• “Cannot be hacked”, “the safest”, “military-grade”.
• “Tested on phones”, while the tests on real phones remain.
• Numbers of users, testimonials, partners, or ratings.

Pictures keep the same rule: no padlock and no shield, because a picture must not promise more safety than the words beside it.

Every page exists in English and in Indonesian, each with its own words, and the browser is asked not to translate them. The first launch is in Indonesia, in Indonesian.

In Indonesian, Patepang says “kamu” everywhere: in the app, on the sites, and in the legal documents too. Outside the legal documents an email is “surel” and a phone number is “nomor HP”.

The rules for writing about Patepang from outside are in the Intellectual property policy.