Solid State UX

Yes. A love of words makes you a better IA.

Wordnik.com doesn’t jump to mind as an obvious resource for an interaction designer.  For a dedicated Sunday puzzle solver?  You bet. Or if you have a grandiloquent and sesquipedalian consulting style (pompous and prone to long words), then this is your place – btw, remind me not to hire you.  I read Wordnik fairly regularly  and am now a self-diagnosed cremnophobic (one who has a morbid fear of being near the edge of a cliff, precipice, or abyss)  and I also know the difference between an acronym, like ACORN, and an initialism, like NAACP (one spells out a word and one doesn’t).  But geeking out on words sharpens an important instinct for anybody who trades in the design of screens-  a fetish for precision in language.   Obsessing over language will keep you from repeatedly stumbling into what  is perhaps the most common antipattern of all – vagueness and ambiguity.   Here’s three main themes to keep in mind when choosing words for your wireframes or designs:

1. The best choice for a word is the one with the fewest competing meanings.

I used to phrase this point differently.  Avoid ambiguous words, I’d advise, which lays the ground for debate on which words are ambiguous and which are not.   Entirely subjective.   But flip the phrase around so that you are identifying words with competing meanings and you have a powerful tool for analyzing language.   Name all the competing meanings for a word or phrase and the winning selection will generally have the fewest.  Period.  I learned this strategy by hearing a Wordnik.com editor discuss how new words for the English language are evaluated and selected.  Geico uses the term “Claims Center” in their global nav, whereas competitors Farmers and Allstate use the term “Claims.”  Which is better?  I’d argue Geico made the wrong choice here.  By adding the word center, they’ve introduced a competing meaning – a “Claims Center” may or may not be a physical building.  Perhaps this link leads to a listing of where the Claims Centers are located, and is not a place to file or manage a claim online.

Geico adds competing meanings by using two words ("Claims Center") instead of one (Claims).

Bad writing is bad writing. This page menu is written in such bland corporate-speak that it is almost impossible to decide where to click.

2. Interfaces often divorce words from their context, especially in global navigation.

Interface design is all about managing transitions between various contexts.  Persistent elements, such as global navigation, ride between multiple contexts.  Typically they are stripped down to their essence for this very reason.  For instance, in a book’s Table of Contents, you can contextualize each and every chapter name with a sub-heading, but a global nav on a website does not have that luxury.  With most websites, you don’t know where a user will enter into the experience, and you can’t assume anything was contextualized on a previous screen.     Navigation words therefore need to be mostly self-explanatory, since they can rely only on the context provided by the other global elements on the site – such as the name and tagline in the header.  When you remove a word from its context, it introduces more competing meanings.  The use of branded words in navigation elements is a very common usability problem.  Sports Illustrated (SI.com) has a disastrous top nav, with links like “fannation,” “swimsuit,”  “extra mustard,” and “maxpreps” that assume a lot of context which is just not present on most of the site’s pages (such as the home page.) Lumber Liquidators is almost aided by the fact that they have a very non-obvious name for a specialist in flooring. They’re forced to add global context to their top nav (lest consumers mistake them for a discount lumberyard) but it’s one way to relieve pressure from the difficult game of finding the right words.

SI.com assumes a lot of prior knowledge about their internal content branding on the part of users. The result is a poor choice of nomenclature.

Notice how Lumber Liquidators takes an unusual step of adding context to a global nav with the label "Flooring:"

An oldie but a goodie: Starbucks global nav was once an ocean of competing meaning. Since Improved.

3. An interface inherits the context of its medium, not just its subject matter.

Sometimes, competing meanings are generated by the very medium in which a word is being used.  I am consistently thrown for a loop when using my company’s travel and expense (T&E) reporting system when given the choice of inquiry or maintenance of my reports.   These words have loads of competing meanings on a website.  Does inquiry mean just open and look at the reports, or does it imply that I am opening some sort of trouble-ticket with a customer service rep?  Maintenance implies seldom used utility features on a computer, like running a batch program to clean up a fragmented hard drive,  not a user making a routine change through a web form. Certainly view or edit would have been better choices. While not the lingo used in the world of corporate accounting circles, they are the words with the fewest competing meanings on a website.

I've used this homegrown system a dozen times, yet always have to guess where to click here.

What are Anti-Patterns?

(Definition taken from Looks Good Works Well) Anti-patterns, also called pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. They are studied as a category so they can be avoided in the future, and so instances of them may be recognized when investigating non-working systems. The term originates in computer science, apparently inspired by the Gang of Four’s book Design Patterns, which displayed examples of high-quality programming methods. - Wikipedia Anti-pattern