Research Language: How User Research Should Direct Your Language Choices
Have you ever thought about language design? Funny, you're not the only one. When most people think about design they think about visuals, but in the world of Human Centered Design and UX design, language is a critical success factor. Design choices around language, like any kind of design, ought to be informed by the people you’re designing for. After all, how do you know if your message will be understood if you don’t know who’s doing the understanding? This is where UX research comes in. UX research helps you define your audience, refine what language is most effective for your audience, and even establish guidelines that can make communication more consistent, effective, and accessible across your organization.
Understand Your Audience
Well-designed products and services start with understanding who you’re designing for. The same goes for the language you’re incorporating into that product or service. As a UX Researcher with a background in writing, I’ve sometimes noticed language considerations come second to other parts of design like decisions around design patterns and style. However, even the most intuitive user interface designs rely on clear language in section headers, directions, and other UI (User Interface) components to help users complete their tasks and accomplish their goals. This is why it’s so important to consider language choices in every step of the HX design process.
Developing this understanding of your audience starts with research. Exploratory research like interviews can help you better understand the language your user is already familiar with. When designing a well-thought-out experience, the design will speak to the user in their own language rather than the language of the people who designed it or jargon that’s unfamiliar to the user. Learning and relying on a target audience’s lexicon—even something as simple as the acronym’s they use every day—can help engender trust, promote return users, and help users accomplish the tasks they’ve set out to do.
You can help validate language choices around information architecture (IA) by having users go through exercises such as card sorting or tree testing, but you can lay a good foundation for IA and language choices in general with a comparative analysis of other organizations in the same field. This will show you the types of language users are accustomed to seeing in similar contexts, and it’s usually a good idea to stick with what users will expect, with a few exceptions.
Part of knowing your audience is understanding how much domain expertise they have regarding the product. Are they subject matter experts or new to this domain? The language choices you make for an engineer looking for a DevOps tool will be different than those you make for the public buying a SAAS product. For an audience with domain expertise, including jargon and industry speak in your language design can help establish your organization as experts in the field. However, if this is for a general audience, jargon is off-putting and can be a deterrent to engagement.
Test Your Assumptions
Whether you’re following the established language trends for your industry or experimenting with new territory, you’ll want to test your assumptions once you have something built. However, the language you use within your tests can be as important as the language in the designs you are testing. Being conscious of your test design can help set up clear expectations for test participants, resulting in fewer no-shows or helping to ensure they’re set up with the right technology for a successful test. Reviewing your discussion guide for leading language or closed question styles can help improve the quality of the data you collect from your tests. For a few suggestions on when and how to test the language in your designs, check out this page on testing your assumptions from plainlanguage.gov, a working group founded to support the use of clear communication in government writing. Whether you follow these guidelines for or develop your own, you’ll want to include steps to validate that your language design choices are having the effect you assumed they would.
Content Guides and Company Practices
To standardize and streamline the process of making language choices in continual design updates, your company might create a content guide that all teams can use as a reference. This can act as a source of truth when the correct language choice is unclear and can help create a cohesive voice and brand presence across your organization. Of course, content guides can and should be updated as new research findings prove alternative language choices to be more effective. This way, all teams can easily reference and benefit from one team’s research. The content guide for VA.gov is a notable example of a thorough style guide that covers everything from abbreviation use to button labels to perspective and voice.
Just as a content guide can help improve efficiency and streamline communications with your end-user, having standards in place around internal communications' language use can speed up getting things from ideation to launch and help avoid confusion and rework. Conducting research around the words different teams use for the same subject can help align teams and clarify communications in handoff docs, for example. Incorporating ongoing feedback from internal users can help ensure language choices evolve with the evolving needs of the team. For example, a quick quiz after onboarding documents can help ensure new hires understand the information they need.
From a company-wide content guide to standardized internal communication practices, creating research-backed sources of truth for language choices can help improve the efficiency of your entire organization.
Accessibility: Keep It Simple
Research-backed language design can help ensure your products are accessible to all populations and help keep products compliant with national and international standards. In particular, the use of clear, simple language can improve the experience of users with cognitive disabilities, a group of disabilities that affect 1 in 5 users.
Best practices like chunking content with logical headers or unordered lists can help make content more scannable and decrease the likelihood a reader might experience cognitive overload. Tools like the Hemingway App or Grammarly can help you identify where your writing has become too complex or elevated.
Employing best practices around plain language and making content easily scannable does not only help populations with cognitive disabilities; considering the reading levels of average U.S. readers, these practices would help improve the comprehension of any language aimed at the greater public. Generally, keep your language as simple as possible while including as much complexity as you must. Just as curb ramps help mothers with strollers and other citizens alongside wheelchair users, accessibility-conscious language choices help all readers.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just starting out discovering a problem to tackle or a mature organization seeking to continually improve as you scale, when you inform your language choices with research, you help your users understand your message and therefore empower them to act. Here at Softrams, we use HCD best practices like comparative analysis and usability studies to confirm our language, from copy to microcopy, is reaching our users in the most effective way.
If you’d like to dive deeper into how research-backed language choices impact your organization, check out this GAAD talk on cognitive accessibility by Softrams Senior UX Designer, Robert Hunziker, in which he discusses how language design can help foster understanding for users of all cognitive abilities. You might also explore this brown bag chat on plain language by Coforma Principal Content Designer, Rick Allen, who explains how writing choices that are conscious of varying literacy levels can help you reach wider audiences. Ready to start using research to inform your organization’s language choices? Reach out to us to discuss how to improve your organization through research-backed language and beyond.
