Passa ai contenuti principali

Consistent terminology is crucial for a user experience (UX)

The User eXperience (UX) describes the interaction of a user with a website. It refers to the communication between the visual and textual data represented on the screen of the computer and the user. One could say that the UX is ‘the smell of a website’.

How quickly a user can make decisions and how efficient he/she can ‘navigate’ a website depends on various factors which are studied by the developers of the website. The developers’ aim is to create a friendly and easy environment for their consumers by paying attention not only to the images, colours, templates or other attracting visual features of their website but also to the textual representation. That means that UX is about the interface between graphic and content. A user is firstly attracted by the colours, the visual representations and the general sense of the website but to the next and most important level he/she needs to take some information, complete a task and interact with the website. If we imagine a website consisted only of images and colourful boxes it is beyond shadow of doubt that no effective interaction can take place.

How do you interact with this pop-up?


Text, thus, is crucial as it provides the most significant information for the user (e.g. login, payment, donate, cancel, etc.). The user needs the textual data. Nevertheless, the user does not want to think. He/she does not want to spend hours looking for his information or completing a registration or doing an electronic payment. He/she needs efficiency in time and that relies on the accuracy and the consistency of the terms which are used. As Bill Gates had mentioned ‘Content is King’, however as I often highlight ‘Terminology is Queen’.

The text which is represented should be clear, simple, understandable, up to date and based on the perspective of the user. It should not cause any misunderstanding or confusion.



Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Little platoons

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society". “Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation". The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid. T

Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal:  a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery.  It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Football or soccer, which came first?

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, a lot of people are questioning if we should refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? This is visible from the queries of the readers that access my blog. The most visited post ever is indeed “ Differenza tra football e soccer ” and since we are in the World Cup craze I think this topic is worth a post. According to a paper published in May by the University of Michigan and written by the sport economist Stefan Szymanski, "soccer" is a not a semantically bizarre American invention but a British import. Soccer comes from "association football" and the term was used in the UK to distinguish it from rugby football. In countries with other forms of football (USA, Australia) soccer became more generic, basically a synonym for 'football' in the international sense, to distinguish it from their domestic game. If the word "soccer" originated in Eng