Revenge of nerdview
Why insider language is insidious
A few years ago, the New York Times published the secret vocabulary of local bartenders. Highlights included Sniper (a customer wearing sunglasses inside the bar at night), Family Meal (post-shift shots for staff), and Monk Juice (Chartreuse).
As a cocktail fan, I find this kind of insider language fascinating — a sneak-peak into a minor subculture. But when insider language appears in a digital experience and I’m forced to decode it without a handy-dandy guide, it quickly gets confusing.
Extracted threshold
Last year, for example, I gave Compass permission to top up my transit card whenever the balance gets low. Or, if you want to get technical about it, my “card is set to AutoLoad $20.00 the next time it is tapped after the Stored Value drops below $5.”
But whenever this blessed event occurs, I have a moment of panic:
Threshold? That sounds bad. To paraphrase the RV salesman on The Simpsons, “You ever known a threshold to be good?”
Unbelievably, I have more examples of inbox trauma:
Extracted? That word is usually paired with confessions or teeth.
Are “threshold” and “extracted” the fault of a sadistic copywriter? No. The culprit is “nerdview,” an organizational tendency to use insider language when describing products and services to outsiders. Coined in 2008 by Geoffrey K. Pullum, I discovered nerdview thanks to Beth Aitman:
If Pullum diagnosed the problem in 2008, why are we still battling nerdview in 2017? Most companies try to hire good copywriters, and good copywriters despise nerdview. But eventually copywriters, no matter how wonderful, learn the language and extracted or threshold no longer look strange. And then one day this happens:
Remove rhizomes, not weeds
It’s possible to stay vigilant about weirdo words, but nerdview isn’t a stray weed to yank out of sidewalk cracks — it’s more like a rhizome. That’s biology or academia speak for a sprawling, complex, interconnected mess hidden below the surface. And while copywriters are capable of many things, they can’t untangle a rhizome singlehandedly. That requires cross-team collaboration, especially with Marketing & Communications (that’s MarCom in nerdview).
MarCom has a habit of creating Brand Biospheres™ — rich linguistic ecosystems filled with trademarked names and tightly controlled backstories that would make George R. R. Martin proud. These biospheres are usually built from market research, while copywriters prefer UX research, which is why MarCom sometimes selects names for products and services that make little sense to customers.
This is why it’s critical to make alliances with MarCom and make nicey-nice with the legal people. As Bill Scott and Mausami Dave-Shah explained in a responsive design podcast about their work at PayPal:
Any time we got legal … in the same room just whiteboarding together, they actually got excited because they’re not used to being part of that, they’re used to being on the very tail end doing something they don’t have any input into. Once they had part of the ownership model, we came up with some nice, elegant solutions in almost every case.
Plus can be negative
At my last job, Premium Plus was a good (that is, a bad) example of the Brand Biosphere™. Our user research demonstrated that users didn’t understand what we meant by Premium device or Premium service tier. Adding the word “Plus” wasn’t going to improve matters. To be fair to MarCom, a mass-media campaign was supposed to educate our customers, but this assumed that a majority of site visitors memorized our TV commercials, billboards and print ads.
Spoiler alert: nope.
We try not to, but Shopify also commits nerdview. We currently use the label “Accepts Marketing” to indicate that a customer has agreed to receive promotional emails. No one on the content team likes that phrase, so we recently tried to improve it. Our detective work revealed that the current language was most likely chosen because the code tag says (accepts_marketing).
Meanwhile, one of our designers did some quick-and-dirty research and discovered that a handful of our partner APIs have incredibly ambiguous names. More precise labelling will mean some documentation updates, which generated a bit of good-natured grumbling. But a bit of employee grumble is way better than a whole lot of user confusion.
Win-win the name game
Customers come to your site to perform a task. They don’t want to parse semi-cryptic language. Speak in their terms and acknowledge their mental models whenever possible. As Elizabeth McGuane, content strategy lead at Intercom, eloquently pointed out in a Slack discussion last year:
We’ve found that people use a combination of terminology they know from other products, if they’re new to us, and our terminology, as well as their own descriptors based on how something looks. So getting to the right canonical name starts with customers, but is not as straightforward as just using their words, because they vary — and sometimes they’re using terminology we want to coax them to change.
Don’t confuse coaxing the user with dictating. Boston.gov discovered this when they tried to kill all of their acronyms. As Lauren Lockwood notes, acronyms are fine when they’re efficient or precise, but terrible when they alienate, confuse, or don’t provide search benefits to users.
Coaxing MarCom or stakeholders can be a bit more work, especially if they exhibit the protective fierceness of a threatened parent when you suggest that Pay For It Your Way is better than Premium DoublePlusGood. In these situations it’s important to make a distinction between naming things right the first time and fixing a name that isn’t working after the fact.
If you can’t convince the powers that be to rename something, then at least try to turn a bad name into a teachable moment. The half-life of nerdview can be measured in years or decades, so don’t immediately surrender. Wrestle the rhizome. And if stakeholders are allergic to UX arguments, tell them that user-friendly names save money.
Or, as our good-close-personal friend Beth Aitman points out:
