Creating a Pleasant User Experience - Part III: Language

Choosing the right thing to say is another aspect of a good user experience. A person using your program may not be familiar with all of the technical terms that you as a developer are use to. If they’re a first time user, they may not even be familiar with the common terms associated with the technology itself. How you label your toolbars and button and how you communicate warnings and errors can help ease the process of learning a new piece of software and will inevitably lead to a faster adoption rate.

This is one aspect that I’ve been really focusing myself on lately. Earlier adopters of RSS aggregators were geeks. Dealing with geeks in geek terms wasn’t a big deal because everyone generally spoke the same language. But now that RSS is becoming more mainstream, and in particular now that my applications are being deployed to thousands of unsuspecting enterprise users, language has become a very important part of my development cycle.

Two examples that I’ve run into recently
The windows credentials that you use to log into your computer at work can be used to authenticate you against almost any other computer on your network. NGES has the ability to also use these credentials to authenticate. Security conscience companies will require you to change your password from time to time, and also make your passwords hard to figure out… which also means hard to remember.

So instead of having users enter the same credentials every time they use my software, and changing the password in my software every X days, I give users the option to use their windows login credentials.

In the .Net framework, using these credentials is as easy as saying CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials. So being a lazy programmer, I used the phrase “Use Default Credentials” in my program. This made total sense to me, but to the person whose never seen a line of .Net code this is really confusing. What are my default credentials? Where did they come from? How do I change them? A quick change (after a long deliberation) and this becomes “Use Windows Login Credentials”, which is much easier for an everyday user to understand.

Another example is the performance slider in DesktopSync. It’s labeled “Slower (less resources)” and “Faster (more resources)”. (This example still exists in the current release of Inbox as well). To me, this obviously refers to system resources. But when someone asked me “Does this mean it will sync less subscriptions?”, I decided it was time for a change. So now it’s still labeled “Slower” and “Faster”, but underneath is the warning “Increasing performance may slow down other applications”. A much better description and warning.

So when your laying out your UI, remember that not everyone who uses your program will be as technical as you are. Take a close look at the language you use and make sure your mom would understand it.