Tales of a Designer

Think Like a User

Being a designer/developer, our language becomes so common, day in and day out, and we sometimes forget that other people don’t understand our lingo. Being that communication is the most important aspect of design, you would think that it is easy for us to get ideas and points across to others. That is not always the case.

This past weekend, me and couple business partners had a three-hour jam session on writing up content for our soon-to-be company website. Now, if you were to see the document, you would wonder why it took so long to write up so little. Well, when writing for the web, it’s pretty important to make things as clear and concise as possible, but that’s not the only thing.

Our process for writing this content went page by page. We would each type out our thoughts, then bring them together for every bit of content. What was essential, was that every single sentence we wrote, we made sure that it would make sense to your average person. We didn’t even bother throwing in terms like XHTML, CSS, AJAX, etc.

Why? Well, who really cares what that stuff is, if they have no idea what it means? That’s the easy way out. Challenge yourself and communicate what you do in a human sense. To put it another way, imagine you want a house built, and you look for different companies. The tools and terms they use won’t really mean much to you. You just want to know that they can do a good job. Well, the web is no different.

In a recent article from Vitamin on communication web 2.0 through design. Now they do talk about it from a design standpoint, however, this easily breaks down into the writing, which you will notice.

So, talking to that next potential client, or writing content for a site, remember to go through that content and make sure that your average person (outside of your industry) can get an understanding of what it is you are trying to say. Why even risk scaring away a user because they can’t understand your jargon? Content always comes first, but how you write that content is just as important. Put yourself in the users’ seat, and every sentence ask yourself “would this make sense to everyone else?”