Customer Rightness Dept.

Ahem. Well, it has, again, been unconscionably long since my last post. A case of feast/famine, either I was too busy to have time for blogging or, as of late, not busy at all, hence having little in the way of au courant topics to put down. The latter situation is because I left my job as user-experience writer at Microsoft. A fascinating story in itself no doubt but of little pertinence to UI text in particular.

Anyway, I have now gotten the ball rolling as a “consultant,” that dreaded and vague term known to all refugees from the world of corporate enslavement. And now at last I seem to have attained that optimum state where I have just barely enough work to provide me with blogfodder – there’s a neologism for ye – (although let’s not talk about “income” shall we?) and still plenty of time on my hands (metaphorically red-ink-smeared as they may be) to actually “reify it” “in print,” if I may use those hoity-toity terms.

My first foray into gun-for-hire “content consulting” (also don’t get me started on the notion of “content”) has dosed me with water perhaps not icy, but enough to cool my usually hot user-experience jets. I was asked to write – well, create, shall we say – web content for a local budding entrepreneur. Oh boy, I thought – UI text, my meat and taters!

Now, I’m pretty generous in my definition of what UI text is. In this case, the “web page content” was not articles, but more or less marketing hype (bane of my existence). But at least there wasn’t much of it. It was in fact brief enough that it served essentially as explanatory or informational text, much the way a block of text in a dialog box or splash screen might detail the purpose and functionality of an app, or what to expect from a set of options. In this case the site users were similarly being told what this company was going to do for them, what expectations to have when calling the number.

My client said the three pages needed to be based closely on the pages of a competitor’s site, so there was just as much if not more editing than writing involved. When I looked at the other site, it was plain to see a couple of things: first off, English was not the first language of that site’s writer, and second, he or she had had certain ideas about how to use SEO. Basically their plan was, the more you use a key phrase, the better, in terms of getting your page viewed by the maximum number of punters.

I’ll say right now that I’m no SEO expert. (I’m assuming there a still a few people on the planet who don’t know that stands for “search engine optimization.”) But a quick Google informed me that the old notion of stuffing your website with keywords was not effective. The latest search algorithms are more sophisticated. So I plunged ahead following my better instincts, trimmed out the triple redundancies, improved the grammar and spelling, and rewrote to avoid plagiarism.

I wound up with three concise, friendly, informative pages. The trifecta of UI text, as far as I’m concerned. What I’ve been trained for ten years to regard as the Holy Grail of User Experience. While proudly showing my client my draft I also pointed out the well known truth that people simply do not read big blocks of web text. No one visiting his site would have to unnecessarily wade through long gray paragraphs, reading and rereading ungainly, empty phrases in an attempt to weed out some crumbs of actual information.

Unfortunately my client was sad.

He liked the other company’s site. He protested that its text was fine: it was a very successful company, so obviously the text was fine. And obviously their repetitive SEO technique in particular was fine, because, presto, those sites popped to the top of his Google searches! (I wondered if the fact that he had repeatedly looked at those sites before contributed to their prominence now, and whether someone searching for the same terms cold would get the same results. SEO experts, feel free to chime in.)

My client was not a native English speaker himself, so while acquiescing to the idea of good spelling and grammar, he had no compunction about downplaying the niceties information design, let alone good literary style.

It was a classic case of “the customer is always right.” So I gave him what he wanted, reinserted the redundant phrases, put the duplicate boldfaced headings back in. I still reworded wherever I could so at least any reader who happens to have common sense and an ear for our language won’t be totally turned off by what might otherwise seem to be a hack job.

I’m reminded of my query some while ago – to what extent the quality of a site (in terms of language) does or does not reflect the quality of their work to a viewer. Not everyone knows English or cares. Depends on the business I suppose. I’m also reminded of a joke my father used to tell about contextual grammar. If you’re being chased by a bear and come upon your friend’s cabin, you beat on the door – when your friend calls “Who’s there?” you’ll probably yell “It’s me, it’s me!” rather than “It is I, it is I!” And that’s OK, as long as he opens the door.

More good usability (and bad-usability) sites

Yes, yes, I know I have been amiss, focusing more on my photo blog than this one.

However, I keep up with this field on a daily basis at work and regularly come across like-minded sites, so herewith I present:

• Unusable: The Blacklist
  
• This Is Information Architecture
  
• Johnny Holland Magazine
  
• 90 Percent of Everything [Bad Design]
  
  

Some interesting links

Tyler Schnoebelen's site, Linguistic Interface Design - The sciency art of UI writing is not up-to-date but there's some interesting material here.

Hits and Messes UI blog

Bad UI Gallery - Nuff said.

Inspire UX has some, well, inspirational bites for folks like us.

Awhile back I was working on some UI for a program that offered the user great flexibility. Good thing, yes? Well… when you start having to reckon with UI text, such as naming a feature or an option, the difficulty quickly becomes clear.

Let’s say you decide to send an IM to your pal. You click a button, right? During the chat you decide that you’d rather talk on the phone with them, and fortuitously the program allows you to transition from one mode to another by clicking a subsequent button. (That is, you could phone them using the computer…like with Skype. Don’t get me started.) Anyway, if the label for the button you originally clicked apparently narrowed your action to sending an instant message, that’s misleading. And from the evangelism standpoint it doesn’t hype the great feature. You’d have been led to believe that you had to do one thing or the other, and the great functionality might be a rude surprise if you discovered it at all.

On the other hand, that workflow seems relatively intuitive, if not common, so there’s an argument for keeping that nomenclature. But there are other cases where ambiguity (or versatility!) starts to make me a little crazy. In most cases, I’d posit, at some point the user has to “fish or cut bait” – choose what he or she wants! Is it an advantage to let users do this at multiple points in the process, instead of having a clear-cut choice at the to level?

For example, do you want to save the document or print it? You wouldn’t instinctively think you’d be able to print it by clicking Save, and typically users are fine with having to make that choice up front. Change your mind? Go back and click the right button. And ultimately it comes around to terminology: if you could in fact print from the Save dialog box, shouldn’t the label of the initiating command (and dialog box) be “Save or Print”? Fulfilling expectations is important. In general this is the way things work.

But in the IM/phone case, to be accurate this would require a very vague top-level command like “Communicate” that would leave your options open – or one or more long labels to point out the possibilities -- and then lower-level commands to get you going down any later road you really want. But there have to be choices for people who know what they want to do at the outset as well as for those who change their minds later. So it’s not ideal to have the vague top-level command(s). And there you are, faced with precise but inaccurate top-level commands and additional precise lower level ones. (Also it’s what they call an endless regression because every time you change mode there’s still the possibility of further waffling -- excuse me, flexibility – so it’s never entirely accurate to use a term that limits the user’s choices.

So there are two issues – how to design so that flexibility is not confusing, and how to talk about flexibility without becoming either meaninglessly vague or irritatingly verbose. Welcome to my world. Maybe I’m over-thinking the whole thing. Hmm, I need some coffee.

My, that's a long button label. Yes, it could be shortened. But it looks to me like that button is completely unnecessary. If the desired chatrooms are selected, then the Apply button ought to suffice. Best to check with the developer...

Just a reminder to us all that our work on UI text isn't always just about tweaking words.

Why user research is a good thing

News flash:

A Facebook group formed for those opposed to the site's new design is nearing 2.7 million supporters, and the leaders organized a two-day boycott to bring their point across.

The group, called "1,000,000 against the new Facebook layout," has greatly exceeded the expectations in its title and encouraged its supporters to stay off Facebook during the weekend of Oct. 18 and Oct. 19.

…Jessica Fishbein, a high school teacher who is one of the administrators of the group with more than 2.6 million backers [says] "Facebook, which normally cared about the feedback of people, just made this decision, didn't really care what the users thought and isn't really responding to feedback," she said in an interview. "People are very upset."

Euphemistically Speaking

A quick rant: I know a couple who don't let their daughter say "What the heck?" or even "What the...?" because "you know what you're really saying is the H word." So... exclamations such as "My goodness," and so on would also be bad because they're euphemisms for "My God," am I right? What is the poor kid left with to express herself? It's not the words so much as the context they are used in that betray the euphemism. If she says "Oh my tarantula," it either makes her sound insane or like she's really stretching for a euphemism, which in fact she would be, and thus fooling no one.

So, for UI text, how bad is it for a UI designer (and I mean writers too) to use one term when both you know and I know that you're really talking about something else? Well, it just makes you sound lke a kid trying to swear without saying the H word.

Why make users stretch their brains to suss out the meaning of a term when a simple one will do?

Bentley's First Law of Label Nomenclature: Think first.

The horror! The horror!

You know, if you're going to use fancy text formatting, you should be sure you know how to code it. There is no such HTML tag as ' .

Copy and Paste for iPhone

Here's an interaction unparalleled for being simple, quick, and effective.

I Heart Commas

Here’s a delightful compendium of confusing language compounded by lack of punctuation.

If the meeting is already cancelled, how can you not cancel it?

Also, “…and close” what? Is that a transitive verb? I hope so! I shudder to think how you might close yourself. But the noun reference is confusing: close the message? Close the meeting?

At the very least, a  little punctuation wouldn’t hurt. Now it’s like the difference between

• When meeting a bear in the woods, don’t stare them in the eye and walk away slowly.

and


• When meeting a bear in the woods, don’t stare them in the eye, and walk away slowly.