History of Plain Language – starting with the UK

Here’s an example from the plainlanguage.gov website:

BEFORE: Disaster Unemployment Assistance provides financial assistance to individuals whose employment or self-employment has been lost or interrupted as a direct result of a major disaster declared by the President of the United States. Before an individual can be determined eligible for Disaster Unemployment Assistance, it must be established that the individual is not eligible for regular unemployment insurance benefits (under any state or federal law).

PROPOSED CHANGE: You can get financial help from Disaster Unemployment Assistance if your job was lost or interrupted as a direct result of a major disaster declared by the President of the United States. To be eligible, you must show that you are not eligible for regular unemployment insurance benefits (under any state or federal law).

No writer should feel put out by having to give up the words shall, pursuant, promulgated, thereunder, commencing, in accordance with, herein, precluded, heretofore, evidenced, and practicable, as banned by the government. Nor will I bemoan the fact that “we” replaces the “the government,” that “you” replaces “citizens,” and that “please” replaces “it is requested.” In fact, I wouldn’t mind if we had to give us words like incarcerated, in order to, initiated – what’s wrong with jailed, to, and started as simpler terms?

Though Canada hasn’t officially adopted Plain Language for government communications, there is a long history Plain Language in various areas of citizen-facing communications. In British Columbia, the movement was particularly active in the legal area, making contracts and public legal education more understandable.

Plain Language resources for writers

Using comics to explain legal proceedings

Vancouver has a shiny new Canada Lin—a subway train—that runs from the Airport to downtown Vancouver. It’s wonderful. As I live out near the airport, I often take it to work, and it shaves a lot of time off my commute. It’s clean and comfortable, and runs every few minutes. However, there are inherent problems with wayfinding; some of them are usability problems, others are content problems. They are not separable, and work together to create either a good experience or a frustrating one.

Inside the airport, the signage says “Canada Line”. As I walk through the airport, I sometimes wonder how these people around me, many of whom have little or no English, find the transit system. Canada Line could mean “information about Canada by telephone” or some sort of train line. But where does it indicate what the Canada Line actually is: a subway train to Vancouver and to the whole regional transit system?

From inside the train, each transit station looks identical, and station signage is sparse. At rush hour, it’s next to impossible to see station signs through the crowds of people on the platform. Riders must learn to look for the signs inside the train that identify the current stop. It takes a while to realize this, and to counter-intuitive look within the train to learn where you are.

The signage on the platforms tells you which trains are coming. A recording announces that the next train on the “outbound platform is for YVR.” The platforms are not labelled, and in underground stations with several twists and turns down the stairs, who really knows which direction is inbound or outbound? Going north, there is one terminal called Waterfront (in other words, downtown). Going south, there are two possible terminals: YVR (the airport code for Vancouver, though the airport is actually in the suburb of Richmond) or Brighouse (also in Richmond). Going north is no problem. You get on the next train. Going south, you need to choose your train if you are going as far as Richmond. The helpful signage displays an electronic schedule such as:

YVR – Airport – 4 minutes

Richmond-Brighouse -  8 minutes

Richmond-Brighouse – 12 minutes

(This setup could be problematic; some riders see past the first line as its size and boldness are subconsciously interpreted as a title, and they automatically skip to the second line to look for “real information”. But that’s a whole other story, and we wonder whether TransLink did any testing of that.)

However, you are more likely to see a series of messages that say something like:

• If you drop something on the tracks, don’t retrieve it yourself. See an attendant.
• Only one bicycle per bicycle area on the train at a time.
• GO CANUCKS GO

The schedule comes around eventually, but your train may have entered and left the station by then.

If you have gotten onto the wrong train, figuring out how to double back and get onto the right train is problematic because of the mapping system inside the train (if you can find one). I know – been there, done that, cursed the entire time.

These may seem like small items, but they’re the crazy-making stuff that ruins your experience. It’s the stuff that makes people post about “the sign says this but what you really need to do is …” and “it’s cute but not too bright…” or “be careful, because if you miss your connecting stop, it takes you an extra 15 minutes to turn yourself around, and believe me, it will happen.”

It doesn’t take much to fix these problems, but it means that someone needs to walk through with a “user experience eye” and make sure that the experience works for all the audiences. For example, the content on the signs could shorten the duration of secondary messages and spend more time on the schedule and train destination. And it means training staff (including whoever is in charge of the electronic platform signage) to follow the guidelines that make the difference between a good user experience and a frustrating one.

Many thanks to Jerome Ryckborst, the UX Manager who collaborated with me on this post, and my project Director, who was the inspiration for this post. Pay attention. Be outraged.

This list is organized arbitrarily by broad category. Hey, my blog, my rules. And what you can do, gentle reader, is add your favourite books to the comments section. More reading, more knowledge!

Planning and Design

Harnessing Complexity (Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen)

Managing Enterprise Content (Ann Rockley)

Content Management Bible (Bob Boiko)

Document Engineering (Robert J Glushko, Tim McGrath)

Content and Complexity (Michael J Alberts, Beth Maxur, eds)

Designing e-Learning (Saul Carliner)

Information Design (Robert Jacobson, ed)

User Experience

Understanding Your Users (Catherine Courage, Kathy Baxter)

The User is Always Right (Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar)

Paper Prototyping (Carolyn Snyder)

Why Software Sucks (David Platt)

Handbook of Usability Testing (Jerry Rubin, Dana Chisnell, Jared Spool)

Storytelling for User Experience (Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks)

Observing the User Experience (Mike Kuniavsky)

Subject to Change (Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer)

Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug)

Simple and Usable (Giles Colborne)

Do Good Design (David B Berman)

Built for Use (Karen Donoghue)

Mental Models (Indi Young)

The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)

Practitioner Guides

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible (Richard Sheffield)

Elements of Content Strategy (Erin Kissane)

Letting Go of the Words (Ginny Redish)

Content Strategy for the Web (Kristina Halvorson)

Creating the Perfect Design Brief (Peter L Phillips)

Business Process Mapping (Jacka Keller)

Request for Proposal (Bud Porter-Roth)

Managing Knowledge (Wayne Applehans, Alden Globe, Greg Laugero)

Managing Your Documentation Products (JoAnn Hackos)

Techniques for Technical Communicators (Carol Barnum, Saul Carliner)

Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog (Kitty Burns Florey)

The Accidental Taxonomist (Heather Hedden)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte)

Envisioning Information (Edward Tufte)

Wordsmithing for Effect

Clout (Colleen Jones)

Neuro Web Design (Susan M Weinschenk, PhD)

Content Rules (CC Chapman and Ann Handley)

Get Content, Get Customers (Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett)

Content Nation (John Blossom)

Curation Nation (Steven Rosenbaum)

Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely)

Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)

Branded Nation (James B Twitchell)

Call to Action (Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg)

Intercultural Communication (James W Neuliep)

A Practical Guide to Localization (Bert Esselink)

International Technical Communication (Nancy L Hoft)

Metadata and Delivery

Audience, Relevance, and Search (James Mathewson, Frank Donatone, and Synthia Fishel)

Search Engine Visibility (Shari Thurow)

Metadata Solutions (Adrienne Tennenbaum)

Killer Web Content (Gerry McGovern)

Wiki (Alan Porter)

Introduction to DITA (Jennifer Linton, Kylene Bruski)

User Engagement

Conversation and Community (Anne Gentle)

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)

SocialCorp (Joel Postman)

Sway (Ori and Rom Brafman)

The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk)

Radically Transparent (Andy Beal, Dr. Judy Strauss)

Crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe)

Participating in Explanatory Dialogues (Johanna D Moore)

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

I just found out about a new podcast series that sounds interesting: the Userability Show. Jared claims they’re some of the most entertaining and educational podcasts available on UX. I’ve listened to a couple of them now, and while it doesn’t complete with The Comedy Network, it is a podcast I can learn from while driving, working out, etc.

Subscribe to their feed through iTunes, other podcast apps, or direct link:

http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/

]]> http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/06/05/podcasts-on-usability/feed/ 0 http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/05/25/delivering-the-steak-not-just-the-sizzle/ http://intentionaldesign.ca/2009/05/25/delivering-the-steak-not-just-the-sizzle/#comments Mon, 25 May 2009 16:00:09 +0000 rahelab http://intentionaldesign.ca/?p=903 How closely do you identify with this scenario: You visit a website, looking to get in and get out quickly – to find the information you need, absorb it, put it to use, and get on with your day. You find the site beautiful; a graphic designer has obviously put a lot of work into the optics. The usability is there, and you find the site easy to navigate. The interactions go smoothly; you can get an account and log into it without a hitch. But when you get to your end point, the content you need simply doesn’t exist.

Whether the content you’re looking for is product content to help you make a purchasing decision, or post-sales content that helps you with product use or maintenance, there are too many sites that seem to be great sites. They might even be winners of industry awards, which they use as ammunition for not changing the status quo. But unless you happen to want what they think you want, you’re left feeling like you’ve been on a treasure hunt, only to find there is no treasure.

This is the “sizzle without the steak” effect, so aptly described byJakob Nielsen in his study of a business consumer researching an LCD projector. The vision of the content a user would need to make an informed decision missed many critical assumptions, resulting in a hunt for content across fifteen different sites.

While Nielsen categorizes this as a usability problem, the usability issues lie with the content more than with the structural or interactivity aspects of the site. Had the content simply been “misplaced” on the site, the user would have shown more bouncing between pages within the site. The fact that the user went to fifteen different sites indicates a serious lack of content on the site. Skimping on content encourages users to practice site fickleness, bouncing from site to site to compare information.

Anticipating what users want to know, and providing the right type of content, in the right place for the right time for the right user, in the right tone keeps users on your site. A good content strategist will look at content through the filter of user experience, and ensure that the content created contributes to a rich user experience, and that there is enough of the right type of content to allow users to complete whatever task they arrived at your site to accomplish.

When the DUO Consulting newsletter hit my inbox today, and I read Sonny Cohen’s post entitled “Site Loading? Skip Intro? You’re Kidding? I’m Outta Here,” I found myself nodding my head in sad agreement. However, a couple of the comments on the blog got me riled up enough to elaborate on the topic here.

To Flash or not to Flash

I have seen Flash intros well executed, but in very rarely and in very specific contexts. Most of the time, it’s an annoyance or worse, a complete block.I used to be able to successfully aruge with developers by reminding them that Flash undoes their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Recently, a developer proudly countered that because Google can now index Flash files, he sees no reason not to revert to Flash. This raised the stakes for me, as the need to “prove” that Flash is counter-productive just became a more laborious task. Here are a couple of user experiences you can try for yourself:

To Flash or Not to Flash

Your task: Find the address of the Moxie’s in Vancouver’s West End.

The test: Does the Flash interfere with getting information?(For a uniquely frustrating experience, repeat the test on your mobile device.)

The site: Moxie’s Classic Grill

Results: I did this exactly once, and only under duress. Each page takes ages to load. The logical “Contact Us” and “About Us” don’t yield any useful information, and the restaurant locator is less than useless. With each page load, I became so resentful of wasting my time (and having my lunch date waiting on the other end of the phone while I went through this exercise), that I now have a slight hate-on for Moxie’s. In other words, the site damaged the brand. It’s not like their menu is so unique that I have to go there to experience a particular type of food.

Conclusion: Nobody likes a flasher, especially when they think that forcing their jiggly bits onto you is cool.

Sound Indulgence

Your task: Go through a testimonial, and find the corresponding site in their showcase.

The test: Can you turn off the sound of the “hostess” to listen to the testimonial? (For a uniquely frustrating experience, try this on a wide-screen laptop, where the lack of screen height  affects the ability to navigate.) How long does it take you to match up the testimonial to the showcase piece? Most importantly, was it worth the work?

The site: Darvak

Results: Observe user behaviour as they wildly start moving the mouse across the page, trying to find the “mute” button. To determine if anyone actually listened to the message, answer these questions:

• What does the organization believe is the key in [sic] graphic design, marketing, and advertising?
• What is the name of the hostess?
• Did they accidentally open the pool game in their desperation to turn off the sound?

Conclusion: Maybe it’s because I spend too much time on airplanes with crying babies that don’t come with mute buttons, but this brings to mind the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard.” Kewl, maybe. Useful? Not so much.

Who Gets It?

The site: Vision Critical

They have a Flash option, which allows users to engage or bypass this. On their products page, the embedded video has controls to allow users to pause and continue, mute, or end the video. Also, users can scan the page while the video loads. And finally, the content in the video is useful. It is an extension of the page content.

The site: Jaguar

The site has a Flash presentation which doesn’t interfere with getting to the information. When I bypass the Flash, I don’t feel like I’m actually bypassing it; I’m simply getting to the information I want. If I want their Flash experience, I can return to it at any time.

The video didn’t really do anything for me, but let’s assume that their market research has shown that the video creates emotional impact. They let you move anywhere in the Flash presentation by moving along the preview bar (Want to see that leather interior again? Click along the bar and return to it.) There is, again, control. I didn’t like the music, so I turned it off.

The site: Adobe AIR

The Flash on the Adobe AIR site is actually useful – it demonstrates what the product does. Their execution is such that I don’t need to take any steps to browse the content on the site or to go about whatever task I set out to do. The lack of interference with other navigation and content elements means that the first time I come to the site (when I’m more likely to view the Flash), I can investigate it when I’m ready to, and on subsequent visits, I can ignore it (because I don’t need to be educated in that way again).

These samples have been chosen at random, from the frustration and appreciation of my personal experience. I used to think I was less tolerant than many users because of my industry experience, but having spent time with some younger users lately, I realize that my tolerance level is quite high, compared to theirs. They expect sites to “just work” and there is about a 2-second window before they go elsewhere in search of content (note: in search of content, not more barriers).

The conclusion isn’t anything startling. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said over the past ten years. Let users stay in control of their experience. Let them complete their tasks without friction. Don’t assume what users want to do on your site; do your due diligence in user-centered design to be sure you’re getting it right. When in doubt, do some user testing. And as a content strategist, I’m obligated to add: start with a strategy, then build to fulfill that strategy.

My reaction, which I couldn’t fit into 140 characters, was that using a self-designation with a certain amount of specificity sacrifices practicality to accuracy. Individuals who have been hired as a single-function specialist may have the luxury of presenting as a “usability engineer” or “information architect”. For the independent consultant, this strategy can have definite negative consequences.

In my practice, I work with a range of clients, from the small start-up to  behemoth multinationals, and every size and flavour of organization in between. I’ve been recommended as a writer who “gets the technical stuff” and ended up spending most of my time revamping their public site, from card sort and user research, through to information architecture and transaction flows, to the usability tests after the developer and designer have finished building it. I’ve been hired as a “usability expert” and the task turned out to be requirements gathering and process analysis – in other words, a business analyst.

Because there is a large degree of fuzziness among the management layer of those who do the hiring of UX consultants, and is compounded by HR groups asked to bring in a “usability person to restructure the site”, or an IA for work that turns out be more interaction design than information architecture, it’s important to concentrate more on describing the services provided. For many years, I described what I provided as “performance improvement for communication products” because that’s how executives understood what I could do for their companies. That might have been rewriting content, restructuring a site, restructuring content for the site; the important part for me was that the client knew what to expect as to the value I could bring to their communication vehicle.

If I were to generalize about how to handle labels, it’s to move up one conceptual level. For example, when in doubt about whether something is a car or truck, move up one level to the term “vehicle”. When in doubt about whether your clients will understand the difference between a BA, IA, IxD, or Usability Geek, move up one conceptual level to the encompassing term of User Experience professional. This places you firmly within the UX field (as opposed to a technical IA, for example), and allows you to engage in a conversation with the client about recommended processes and where you fit within that realm.

Then it occurred to me that it could be a browser incompatibility problem. No, surely not from an organization with the words “New Media” in their name. No, it doesn’t seem to be that problem, though IE does seem to pile the sub-menu words on top of each other as I mouse over the primary menu items, requiring me to refresh the screen several times before I can read all menu items.

This is a classic situation of the “cute but not too bright” site. The site was developed to be very attractive and nominally useful, but I can tell that there was no user-centered design involved. If there had been, the persona of “Member” with a relatively core scenario of “logging in to update profile” would have yielded an appropriate usecase, and the resulting deliverables – wireframes and transaction screenflows – would have addressed this rather shocking gap.

Now, I will admit to being the 5% for whom things don’t work the way they do for the rest of the world. For example, when the local telecommunications company came to my multi-tenanted office building to install a cell tower, they knocked out a couple of phone lines by accident. Mine was one of them. So perhaps the site works fine for most others, and it’s just me that’s not seeing some bright, well-placed link to “Member Profile”, and if that is so, I apologize for using this organization as an example.

But let’s assume, for a moment, that what I see is what everyone else sees. In that case, the resources expended doing the mail-out, asking members to update their profiles, has now been in vain if the email recipients cannot fulfill the request. Additional resources will be expended to handle the requests that arrive from members wondering how to complete the task. If, indeed, a fix needs to be made, yet more resources are needed to fix the site, then send out another email to members. The results of the second email may be less effective than the first, as members may assume this is simply a resend of the first email and delete without reading it.

The principle remains true: it’s critical for a website to be useful first, pretty second, and the only way to ensure that is to follow a UCD process before tackling the graphic side of the design. In the previous example, the ROI of employing UCD before creating the site, the first time, in a way that all the core use cases could be handled would have far outweighed the financial and relationship consequences of only one botched email campaign. Back in the 190s, one agency estimated that “…cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100. Once a system is in development, correcting a problem costs 10 times as much as fixing the same problem in design. If the system has been released, it costs 100 times as much relative to fixing in design.” (Gilb, 1988) I would love to see some numbers from this decade, as agile development methods may have turned the metrics a bit. However, whether the ratio is $1:$10-$100 or has dropped to $1:$5-$50, those are still large numbers, if you think of it in terms of shareholder profit that could be recovered while improving service to customers.