Image by storyset on Freepik

About once a week, I give my grandmother a phone call. If she’s feeling adventurous, we might even attempt a video call. Either way, in that split-second before we connect, we both do something magical: we code-switch.

You’ve been there — one second you’re you, and the next you’re… a subset of you. Different social contexts and dynamics dictate how stark the adjustment is, and how natural or unnatural it might feel. Some of the reasons for code-switching are problematic, but the underlying necessity is always the same: fitting in.

This phenomenon nicely plugs into Barnlund’s transactional model of communication, according to which interactions occur within a shared reality that arises from a mutual assessment of social, relational, and cultural contexts and is shaped by cues such as environment and body language. Such an organic and complex process is best represented in face-to-face communication, where feedback is layered and continuous, but seems hardly applicable to computer-mediated communication, especially if feedback is limited to error messages and hover states. For this reason the transmission model of communication is more often invoked in digital interactions, in which a sender encodes a message and a receiver decodes it. But the problem within the context of digital experiences is that the message lives in an environment designed by the sender (us), forcing the receiver (our user) to do the heavy lifting by not only decoding our message, but doing so in an information-dense environment that was completely foreign to them until a few moments ago.

Our message is effectively drowning in a sea of organizational and semantic noise that is part and parcel of the product itself.

Of course, as designers, we take steps to ensure that our copy is concise and unambiguous, and if we’re decent designers, we’ll also consider how our tone and language matches our branding, how it will be received and interpreted by our users, and how actionable it ultimately is. However, this is often a post-hoc process, somewhat divorced from the rest of the product design cycle. None of this ever gets a chance to influence the Information Architecture for instance, nor the Visual Design.

At best, it won’t get in the way.

So how do we make this easier on the user? By deploying the secret weapon every designer should have in their toolkit.

Nope… not empathy.

Image by storyset on Freepik

Writing.

Writing about anything presupposes some degree of understanding of the contextual richness around that topic. Contextual richness is what allows me to sneak the occasional Sicilian expression in my conversations with my grandmother, because it’s so much easier to match someone else’s language than to limit our word choice to the intersection of our world and theirs. She usually laughs at my delivery or pronunciation, and that’s the beauty of it: she understands how infinitely different her world is from mine and she appreciates my effort to understand it better. That same richness can be found everywhere in UX practices, from generative research to usability testing. Heck, it’s probably the only useful aspect to making personas! Do we really empathise with an airbrushed face in duo-tone lighting we found on Unsplash only because we gave them a cute name and a half-baked backstory? Probably not. It is, however, a useful shorthand for how user needs differ from our own perception of user needs, and we get there by making those unintuitive differences verbally explicit. Otherwise personas just become an exercise in creative writing.

The language we’re exposed to and choose to use can influence our senses and drive our actions.

Constructivist theories posit that the sophistication of our frameworks is intimately tied to our ability to verbalise them, and the prime vehicle for integrating new knowledge into our pre-existing models is that of social discourse as well as direct experience. While this theory is not without critics, it’s clear that what was traditionally thought of as a left-brain process is now understood to be much more distributed and integrated with other mental processes. Notably, the practice of committing thoughts to page has profound effects on our metacognition, exposing the gaps and biases in our understanding of a subject. This is particularly true of writing by hand as opposed to typing, which might explain why so many of us find it helpful to put ink to paper if we ever feel creatively stuck.

“The more you start thinking about writing as a design process, the clearer the power of words will become.” — Andy Welfle

Andy Welfle helpfully gives the punchline away right in the title of his book “Writing Is Designing”. While working at Adobe, he turned his systematic content approach into a science with a centralised system for crafting tone and terminology that take into account a user’s likely state of mind, current activity, and intention. But I’d argue that explicit verbalisation shouldn’t be a UX Writers’ exclusive, and that taking copious notes at every step of the product lifecycle will establish a sort of project-specific vernacular, an ongoing metacommentary documenting how people react and relate to our ideas. This is precisely why we favour direct quotes over paraphrasing participants’ impressions when analysing research data: how something is said is just as important as what is said.

Image by storyset on Freepik

To give a practical example, while working on a networking and collaboration platform I noticed that research participants were mostly using the term “project”, whereas I had been referring to “initiatives”. I initially dismissed this as semantics, and even believed my word choice to be more appropriate, as foundational research highlighted a desire to join socially useful local community activities… you know, initiatives. But it turned out that this preference wasn’t at all arbitrary, the word I chose had specific connotations that directly tied into a primary pain point of the target demographic: a lack of agency due to the indifference of the local government. My language reminded them of existing solutions that just weren’t working. This realisation didn’t just affect my wording in the labelling of icons and features, it effectively uprooted my entire Information Architecture when I finally understood that my users were conceptualising the product in a completely different way from my own. The more spontaneous and extemporaneous nature of the word “project” took the design to an entirely new direction.

Chances are that as we move from the more abstract elements of a project to its more concrete parameters there will be words that stick, patterns that reoccur, and if we make the effort to incorporate them into our system they will be our compass when talking to stakeholders, brainstorming with our team, formulating questions in our studies, and ultimately capturing the essence of our design. Lorem Ipsum? I hardly know ‘em.

Now excuse me, I need to make a phone call.