Words Matter

One cold, snowy day in February--in Texas (seriously, it wasn’t funny), Niall, Sara and I were sitting around a table (during our Certified User Experience class) trying to come up with a script for one of our usability tests. We were going back and forth around which words to use and finally I just asked our professor Brian, "Are we obsessing over the wrong thing here......wrestling over which particular words to use?" (I guess I was worried that maybe we were over thinking the exercise.)


His response surprised me. He said, "You have to do that....words matter."


WOW! In that one phrase, Brian affirmed a profound truth I have always known, but sometimes shrink back from expressing. Words are powerful because they have the capacity to convey a reality and to point us toward a particular truth or meaning. The better the word choice, the more clear the meaning or understanding of the reality could be.

This is why during site visits and customer interviews, when we ask our customers questions and they say a little, we sometimes ask them to "say more". Sometimes, their use of additional words or different words helps us to better understand --or DISCOVER with greater clarity-- the truth of their reality.

This is why as we worked on the Online Learning Environment (featured in the last post), we watched and listened (through usability testing) to how our customers were interpreting the environment they were in front of and how they were understanding the meaning of the words.
As we observed them, we tried to DISCOVER what words would prompt them to go to a certain place or asked them to tell us what words they were expecting to see to indicate they had arrived at the right location.

So we had to determine, do we use the word "assessment" or do we use the word "test". Do we write the words "vocab builder" on the button, or do we put the words "play game" on the button. In this case, what started out as “assessments” became “tests”. What started out as a button with the words “vocab builder” became a button (shown below) that said “play game” (and vocab builder served a more descriptive purpose).

Does it mean that we spend hours and days on choosing just the perfect word? No; to reiterate what we talked about at one of our last company meetings, we need to hold in tension the triple constraints of time, cost and quality. But what it does mean is that we pay attention during the discovery phase and the evaluation phase & we do our best to choose the words or images or icons etc.  that best represent the truth of the reality--and then try it. We'll learn soon enough if we are understood, or if we understand the customers’ reality--and we keep moving forward. The moral of the story is---Words matter.


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**To ponder this further

(either individually or with your team)

 consider the question:

How does the above reality transfer into my own work or the work of our team?