No one wants to learn your UX language

My first impression begins in a noisy, crowded coffee shop in the middle of downtown Toronto, with little more than 10 minutes before a friend will arrive to join me. I have downloaded the app, I open it up and suddenly realize I’m about to get an entirely new vocabulary.

The app in question was Quip, and it’s a mobile word processing program I thought might be helpful to me. As applications go, you might expect word processing should be almost as intuitive as putting a piece of paper in a typewriter. Not so. Immediately following the first launch, Quip presented me with an introductory document that I’d estimate was at least 1,500 words long. It was filled with supporting screen shots and was simply expressed, but what surprised me was that not only the product but individual features seemed somehow branded.

If you were to write a document that contained messages inside it from co-authors, Quip explained, that’s called a “thread.” If you link within a document to a person, place or Web page, that’s called a “mention.” If there are changes that occur in a document as various authors or editors look at it, those are referred to as “diffs.” (These terms were bolded in the introduction, which has got me thinking we could refer to fancily-named features in an app as “bolds.”)

Please understand that I don’t mean to pick on Quip here. I see this kind of thing all the time, and it could probably be attributed to the effect of Twitter and other high-profile social media services. Besides attracting VC funding, being covered on Tech Crunch and having a young white CEO under 30, there is no other sign of startup status than inventing words. (The OED, which named “selfie” as the word of the year, is not helping matters here).

Perhaps the idea is that users will connect more deeply to an experience that comes with its own speciality jargon for carrying out tasks. Maybe it’s like creating a sort of club where only privileged, knowledgable members can speak to each other. But that’s not great user experience (UX) design, at least not to me.

The best experiences I have with software — or anything really — occur with a minimum of training and an absence of specialized language. Facebook, which gravitates to everyday terms such as “like” and even “poke,” seemed to understand this from the beginning, which could account for why it is among the leaders in its field.

It also strikes me that this tendency to create obscurity in UX is far different than what I see in academia. Researchers tend to do much better at stepping back and merely watching how users behave, then create conditions that allow them to adapt to an experiment with minimum effort. Somehow this principle can let lost in the journey from intellectual property development to commercialization. The solution is in three familiar words that anyone should be able to master: Keep it simple.