Michael J. Metts

As you design with words, you’re creating digital places where people spend their time. It’s a big responsibility. One person who has spent a great deal of time thinking about, working with, and writing about using language this way is Jorge Arango. He’s an information architect and the author of two books on the subject. Arango believes that one way to learn how to use words more effectively is to learn another language. “The reason I advise that is that it forces upon you, at a very deep level, an understanding that language is contingent on historical factors we take for granted,” he said. “Language is so important to us, and we acquire it so early on, that we can lose sight of the fact that it is a construct, and one that is evolving.”

However, Arango believes that writers have valuable skills to offer the technology industry—especially when it comes to creating names and labels for digital products. “I suspect that most people come to these decisions with vocabularies that are not as broad as the job demands,” he said. As an example, Arango described how something like a News Feed (used by Facebook and others) brings certain user expectations. “News is the feedback mechanism of our society; we vote based on the things we learn in the news,” he said. “When we take a concept like that and we subvert it for commercial use, that’s something that should give you pause.” This is the greatest responsibility you have when you use writing to design experiences. You’re not simply coming up with labels for buttons and navigation—you’re changing how your users think. “Persuasion is a powerful thing,” he said. “If you are the person who controls the form of the environment by defining its boundaries through language, the persuasion will happen without me even knowing it’s happening.” Writing the user experience may be difficult at times. It’s a skill that’s often underestimated and undervalued. However, it’s exactly what the world needs.

In fact, one study by User Interface Engineering showed that when each team member spent two hours in contact with their users every six weeks, the quality of their work increased dramatically.

One of the best ways to test how your users perceive and understand what you’ve written is to remove it from the interface completely and test it by itself.

One thing many writers have a strong opinion about is the serial (or Oxford) comma. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the comma that comes before the “and” in a list, as in “this book is about writing, designing, and the user experience.” Every major style guide on writing takes a firm stance. (The Associated Press Stylebook, for example, is against using it, but the The Chicago Manual of Style is for it.) It’s common to see writers declare their personal stance in their Twitter profile.

“Without it,” proponents cry, “There will be chaos! No one will know to what we’re referring in lists!” Then they point to an example of an author dedicating their book to “my parents, Beyoncé and God.” On the other side, the anti-serial comma faction pipes up. “But that’s why we have context clues! We all know it’s implausible for someone to believe God is one of their parents! Plus, we could just reorder that list to ‘God, Beyoncé and my parents’! That comma is redundant and therefore unnecessary! We must be concise!”

In her book Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, Sara Wachter-Boettcher writes about a smart scale that emails you when you step on it. By default, the message it sends when your weight is higher than it was before is disappointed, but encouraging: “You’ve gained X pounds. Better luck next time!” To someone who is trying to lose weight, the message is fine. Harmless, even. But what about someone with anorexia, or a child, even, who’s trying to gain weight? It’s an eye-rolling message at best and harmful at worst.

If you work for a large company, you’ll often find information about your users’ language in places like call-center logs or support tickets. Build relationships with those teams and see if they can share their data. By breaking that data down, you’ll begin to see the most common patterns emerge, and you’ll be able to incorporate what you found into your writing. Data scientists can be an incredible resource in situations like this if you have access to one.

Inclusive language helps everyone feel like your product is made for them, but you may work with some people who object to the idea that you’re spending time and effort making your product inclusive. They may say, “This experience works for 95% of people. Isn’t that enough?” Well . . . no. At the time of this writing, there were 7.5 billion people in the world. If you exclude even one-tenth of one percent, that means there are 755 million people who are less able to (or can’t) use your product, or pay for your service, or experience your interface. In reality, that number is much higher. In 2018, the World Health Organization reported that there were an estimated 217 million people with a severe vision impairment—36 million of those people were blind. And 466 million people had a disabling hearing loss or deafness. In the United States alone, the Reeve Foundation estimates that around 5.4 million people have paralysis of some kind.

When you think about your user base’s gender and sexuality, there are so many people you often and easily exclude. The Williams Institute, part of the UCLA School of Law, estimates that 10.3 million adults in the United States alone identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual—and 1.3 million identify as transgender.

Standards for Writing Accessibly Writing to meet WCAG2 standards can be a challenge, but it’s worthwhile. Albert Einstein, the archetypical genius and physicist, once said, “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”