That time we all became UX specialists

If you’re under a certain age, there’s a great chance you became a UX practitioner over the festive break -- you helped your parents figure out Netflix.

We’ve all been there.

More than likely, you’ve been on a date (I should be so lucky) or meeting only for your mum or dad to call. 

You ask if it’s urgent, but it turns out they just need help with setting up their printer or finding photos from a cloud service.

But with Christmas, there’s no calling back. They’re there, in your face, and they want you to solve their tech problems.

So, you’re forced to play UX guru -- guiding your parents through tasks in order to achieve a goal.

While in the past, this may have been the worst part of Christmas, I now have UX writing experience -- so I should be able to knock it out of the park, right?

Well, kinda. I was more effective in guiding my dear mother than ever before, but it was still the worst part of Christmas.

So, what did I learn? 

1. They don’t know function on a button, they can only see the colour and the shape

Saying the words ‘just hit back on the remote’ is akin to asking how long a piece of string is.

Whereas the tech-savvy may assume back would look something like this < , that’s not necessarily something everybody will pick up on right away.

If your buttons aren’t clearly labelled with a clear description of what will happen if a user hits that button, your user is going to have a bad time.

In lieu of descriptions, use simple visual cues to describe what a button may do. Green, more than likely is going to mean ‘go’ or ‘next’. Red, is more than likely to mean ‘stop’ or ‘exit’.

Nailing buttons and button descriptions is key to guiding a user through a task.  

2. Use their language

“There’s a red x up the top, do I hit that?”.

Pay attention to the words your user is using (geddit?) to describe a task or an interface.

For example, you might know what a tilde key is (~), but your intended audience may not. If they refer to it as a ‘squiggly line’, from there on out you should probably refer to it as the ‘squiggly line button’.

This doubles into content strategy as well.

In her book Content Design, Sarah Richards describes the confusion which can be caused by saying ‘hydraulic fracturing’ on an oil company website.

While the company and the broader industry may refer to hydraulic fracturing as just that, the majority of other users refer to it as ‘fracking’.

By aligning your terminology to the terminology of the user, you’re better placed to provide a better experience.

3. The user is right, your words are wrong

In a mild extension of the ‘customer is always right’ maxim (they’re not, by the way), there is no such thing as a user failing to complete a task.

As a UX writer, you have failed to guide them through the task.

While at Christmas it’s easy to get frustrated at parents just not figuring out Netflix, it’s because you’re not giving them the right instruction.

After all, they’re not dumb (most of the time).

If they are failing, it’s on you.

Having this mentality is crucial to being a UX writer (I’ve found, anyhow), where copy is centred on the best words for the user rather than what looks good or even makes grammatical sense.

But, this is just one man rambling -- did you take any lessons away from your Christmas break?