When More Friendly Is Less Friendly

Everyone is talking about TONE these days, not only for web pages but for apps and operating systems. The notion is that now, more than ever, text that users see on the screen should be friendly and human.

Well, fine. We in the UX and UI text biz have been saying that for decades. Nice to see that the industry has finally caught up to us.

However, it's another thing when the style guides for that tone are driven by management and inflated by marketing and, as usual, the last folks who get a word on the matter are those people for whom language really matters, the writers.

The fact of the matter is that not all users need or even like sizzle. Snappy tone doesn't fit with every scenario or every product. And when it comes right to it, when you have non-writers at the wheel, the play of language design and visual design can get downright counterproductive.

Here's a case in point.

Everyone by now knows how a check box functions and what it means. It works the same whether on paper or onscreen. You check the box to specify that you want the item, or uncheck it if you don't. It's beautifully simple. The only text you need is the label that tells what you're choosing or rejecting.

But what if the design mandates that check boxes are too "robotic" and should be changed to on/off switches? Skeumorphism aside, these controls are not intuitive without labels. Words must be used to distinguish one position from the other. Depending on how the original label is worded, Yes and No might be sensible for the on/off positions, or perhaps On and Off. But either pair conversely affects the label text too; they have to logically fit the English syntax.

Especially troublesome are options that have been worded in the negative. Now, this is something that at least Microsoft Style has recommended against for some years, but of course it still occurs.

Understandable, if a bit odd:
Do not print [ ]
(User thinks: "I do want to print, so I'll leave that blank. Although I wonder why it doesn't just say "Print"?)

"Friendly" double negative:
Do not print [No]
(User thinks: "Hmmm...does that mean 'No, I do not want to not print'? That's weird.")

"Friendly" nonsequitur:
Do not print [Off]
(User thinks: "Hmmm...does that mean turn printer off? Or...what?")

Below, the simple porting of a control from a desktop app design to a new, web-based design, necessitates a new label, which is supposed to equate to a friendly, human "experience."

Here it works pretty well. When you click the slider switch to No or Yes, it answers the implied question of the label. Still, the option on the left is phrased negatively, so what does it mean to choose No? It would be a lot clearer to word this as "Task effort IS equal to..." and change the default to Yes.

Another thing to watch out for is labelling consistency. Yes and No work well with verbs because the question is implied: [Do you want to] specify production order?   However, "Cost category" is a noun, and Yes and No is ambiguous at best. 

Another issue arises when some check boxes are not turned into switches - particularly if sitting cheek-by-jowl with switches! Is it intentional? If so, why? 

Or, for that matter, why not go whole hog and change Yes/No dropdown menus to either a check box or a switch?

But those are design issues. This being a UI Text blog, my main bugaboo is trying to reply to a non-question with a Yes or No, especially when a labelless check box was doing the job simpler, more elegant, and - dare I say it - friendly manner.

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.