The poetics of interfaces
At the London Content Strategy Forum last month, Des Traynor gave a wonderful talk called The Language of Interfaces.
To paraphrase recklessly, his main point was that words should be treated with respect in interface design.
In a subsequent blog post, he went so far as to say they’re the most important part of an interface.
It’s about clarity, and as he says, “Clarity is best achieved through words. Icons are a tricky beast to work with. They can be literal or metaphorical.”
Of course, the same is true of words1.
Various tragedies
If you’ve ever worked on an interface design, you’ll know that agreeing on copy is difficult. I have found that it can go down two equally soul-shrivelling routes.
Sometimes we’re striving so hard for clarity that we spend hours arguing over linguistic rules:
“Is spending really a word?”
“Should that be in present or past tense?”
“If I kill myself right now, everything will be past tense.”
In these situations, form gets in the way of meaning.
Sometimes we’re trying so slavishly to inject ‘brand’ into copy that what we end up with means nothing at all:
“We need to sound human.
Put the word ‘human’ in there somewhere.”
Now style has supplanted meaning altogether. And form’s probably gone out the window too. (This is my least favourite kind of writing argument, because it’s virtually unwinnable).
Copywriting is not a sum: it’s not n + n + n = the message. But words can be binary - switch one on or off, and the structure of your design can be changed utterly.
Which means we have a lot to learn from poetry.
The spoken word
Let’s check in with Emily Dickinson:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Obviously your interface copy doesn’t have to rhyme (though that might be charming). But Emily was right: speaking your words aloud is a fine way to establish voice and clarity.
Dickinson also created her own conventions. She understood that brevity imposes constraints on rhythm. Likewise, in interface copy, questions of form are better answered by the ear rather than the eye – especially when you consider that people usually remember meaning, not form.
So if we want people to understand and use something, formal correctness is secondary. I’m not saying we should throw the rules out the window. Just that it’s okay to break them when structure demands it.
Paging Mr. Dressup2
One of my favourite writers, Nicholson Baker, wrote a book a few years ago called The Anthologist, about a poet trying to write a poetry anthology.
He went even further than speaking his words aloud. He dressed up like his character in order to get closer – not to the character, but to what he cared most about.
“I did a lot of videotaping of myself talking in the character… I set up a camera and grew quite a huge beard and tried to be a poet. I had this old fisherman’s hat that I wore.”
Though I would love to suggest that we all start dressing up like the personas we design for (please let’s do this), what I think Baker was doing was extricating himself from his own ingrained habits of form and rhythm. He knew that his ‘silent writing’ voice and the clear voice he wanted to embody in this character were not the same:
“I have a tendency to get too fancy, to get myself tied up in torturous sentence fragments that would never be sayable… But if I speak it, I’m surprised how everything I have to say obediently gets in line, like people waiting for a bus.”
Poetic justice
I think the key word there is ‘surprise’.
You can’t argue your way into the correct way of writing something. Nor can you ignore the writing until the rest of your design and application are ready to launch.
In interface copy, sense and style go hand in hand. The first step is to start talking. Only then can you understand what you’re actually asking people to do.
1. Des, I know you know this.
2. If you don’t know who Mr Dressup is, I am sorry for your childhood.
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6 responses to The poetics of interfaces
I’ve been in many of those linguistic rule conversations along with the push/pull of brand tonality in microcopy.
For me, I notice a distinct difference in whether a message architecture was created at the beginning of the projects. If anything, it gives everyone in the room something to reference when the arguments start to occur because you can refer back to the MA as the unbiased tiebreaker if you will.
Thanks for this Elizabeth.
Thanks Matthew! I agree – a message architecture is a great first step and sounding board for any content project. What I’ve unfortunately found is that I’m asked to consult on interface design projects far too late (if at all) because people don’t think of the words in an app as ‘content’ – which is why Des’s talk really resonated with me. But I’d love to insist that IDs and developers construct a messaging architecture before they do anything else, to get them thinking about what their tool or app should convey, as well as how it’ll work.
Yes, yes, yes. We get called in to clean up things fairly often too, and it is SO HARD to find the message in the mess. What we’ve discovered is that sometimes, there wasn’t one — and so each person/team involved has created their own. Talk about a situation where you have unwinnable arguments.
Great post –
Nice post Elizabeth, I agree with your point.
I had a slide relating to abstractions, that I pulled from the talk, as it was too much a meandering thought. But it related to how abstract the words in interfaces are.
At a very basic level, you could name a button “Click” – as that’s what it appears to do to the user. Or you could name it “Send the data contained on this page to the webserver for processing”, which shortens to “Submit” the default text on buttons.
Or you could call it something that relates to the user intent, e.g. “Post Comment”, or you can stretch for more abstract, loftier, aspiration-related, words and call it “Communicate my opinion” or something equally weird.
So in that sense icons or words can be equally literal or metaphorical.
Which is why the floppy disk icon confuses me. It’s an odd one. The concept of “Save” pre-dates the floppy and is pretty abstract. You’re saving the file the same way you save money or stamps, I guess. But the floppy is a literal interpretation of that action, in that it used to mean “Write this to the floppy disk”. Now the icon has lived on, far beyond the disk. So it has gone to being abstract. So when you’re looking at a floppy disk icon in Windows, it’s metaphors all the way down.
I guess you can see from the above ramble, why the slide didn’t make the cut
Hi Des! Yeah, there is a really pedantic pomo point to make about signifiers and the signified, and how all communication is an abstraction, but I am not going to make it because it won’t get us anywhere – though I do enjoy meandering thoughts, and I have had real copy discussions that have gotten that weird and abstract before
But glad you liked the post.
Yeah, it’s the sort of discussion that starts off useful but ends up with everyone growing beards, wearing sandals, and debating the true nature of language. Which sounds fun, but doesn’t solve UI problems