It’s funny that the UX industry preaches plain english and transparency to our clients, yet so much of our documentation is riddled with jargon and euphemisms. Perhaps someone should put together a crib sheet?
“The deliverable will be a high level overview…”
– It’s gonna be vague.
“…very high level…”
– It’s gonna be incredibly vague.
“There are numerous opportunities for improvement”
– Your UI is a car crash but we’d prefer not to offend you until the contract’s signed.
“We’ve identified some low hanging fruit…”
– You’ve made some huge design mistakes. We could tell you how to fix them right now, but you’re more likely to listen to us after you’ve paid us five or six figures.
“Cognitive load”
– It’s just plain confusing.
“Our consultants have a background in Psychology”
– They’ll keep saying ‘cognitive load’ over and over again.
“Poor visual hierarchy”
– The page is a cluttered mess.
“Enhance the call to action”
– Make that button bigger.
“Most users had difficulty completing this task.”
– The intern didn’t write down exactly how many people it happened to… But that doesn’t matter because it’s a high level report, right?
True. The opposite doesn’t always work well too. I guess the right way to say things is in the middle.
You believe saying “The page is a cluttered mess.” is the best way to go?
I’m not going to make a sweeping generalisation one way or the other. Sometimes brutal honesty is needed, sometimes it’s not.
This is great stuff. Here’s a couple of my own:
“We’ll need to begin with a fresh information architecture”
– This is such a mess, your users cannot find anything!
“I don’t think my organisation is quite capable of handing this job but I know one that would be well suited”
– This is going to be a nightmare job so I’m gonna pass it to a competitor and watch them crash and burn!
Good post.
The usability of many UX documents is patchy; style guides that are vague and hard to translate into code. Usability requirements ditto. Lack of prioritisation. etc.
This is so going to be posted at my desk!
“Our initial tests were conclusive…”
– Everyone in our office hated it.
Good post. UX jargon drives me nuts.
Ha ha. Love this.
Here’s a couple more…
Provide consistent and more salient call to action options – the design is a complete mess and users couldn’t be bothered to carry on their journeys
provide safeguards and reassurance to security conscious users – no-one trusted your site because it looks like it was designed by a 5 year old
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“Applying Agile and Lean UX methodologies”
– if you’re not quick then your wallet will shrink very quickly