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UX in the City, Oxford: Getting the words right
- 1. Vicky Buser Information architect, GOV.UK Government Digital Service @vickybuser
- 3. GDS 1. Why words matter 2. Why they’re hard to get right 3. Tools and techniques
- 4. GDS
- 5. GDS 190,000+ documents 10m visitors a week General public and professional users
- 7. GDS Words = language = meaning
- 8. GDS Language = a commonly held agreement between people about what verbal sounds will represent which buckets of ideas Source: “The Silo Effect” by Gillian Tett
- 9. GDS IAs group, categorise and label things on behalf of users
- 10. GDS Labels are important in navigation
- 11. GDS
- 12. GDS
- 13. GDS
- 14. GDS So getting the words right is core to UX
- 15. GDS
- 17. GDS
- 18. GDS Context can be level of knowledge
- 20. GDS
- 21. GDS
- 22. GDS Context can be culture
- 24. GDS Context can be emotional state
- 26. GDS Words can create the right (or wrong) emotional tone
- 27. GDS
- 30. GDS
- 32. 2. Why words are hard
- 34. GDS Words are often ambiguous
- 36. GDS
- 37. GDS Language changes all the time
- 38. GDS
- 39. GDS
- 40. GDS
- 42. GDS Tool 1: Contextual user research
- 45. GDS Tool 2: Search term analysis
- 46. GDS 6% of users use site search About 5m searches a month 66m searches in 2015 Almost 17m different search terms used in 2015
- 47. GDS
- 48. GDS
- 49. GDS
- 50. GDS
- 51. GDS
- 52. GDS
- 53. GDS
- 54. GDS
- 55. GDS
- 56. GDS Tool 3: Card sorting
- 57. GDS
- 59. GDS Bringing all the evidence together
- 60. GDS
- 61. GDS
Editor's Notes
- This is a title side
- And this is what we’re going to be looking at during the next 45 minutes
- Since last February I’ve been working as an IA on GOV.UK Here’s the GOV.UK home page Most of you have probably used GOV.UK at some point Perhaps because you needed to Renew your passport or your car tax Or repay your student loan It’s a bit of an unusual site in two main respects Firstly our users are everyone Because everyone needs to interact with government at some point And secondly - government content covers everything from day to day needs to critical situations And it’s all important
- Because of this And because it’s a content-rich information site Made up of lots of documents (currently 190,000 and rising), Covering lots of subject areas, And those documents are made up of lots of words It provides lots of interesting examples About how language and words Can affect whether the user can complete the task they set out to achieve Or not. The GOV.UK audience is potentially anyone living or working in the UK who needs information about their government, or people abroad who want to do business in, study in or travel to the UK. This means government must communicate in a way that most people understand.
- So why do words matter so much?
- Let’s start with the basics Words make up language Language is meaning
- We label and categorise things to help us make sense of the world As humans we’re hard-wired to classify This is what language is at its core - namely a commonly held agreement between people about what verbal sounds will represent which buckets of ideas. [from the Silo Effect book] Spoken language is essentially a labelling system for concepts and things Every time we talk about a tree, a book, a table, a chair we’re classifying things And because we constantly label, we take act of labelling for granted
- And the role of the IA is to group, organise and LABEL things on behalf of other people To make it easier for those people to find and understand those things So words play a big part of my role
- A good label provides strong INFORMATION SCENT It provides the right navigational cues It contains trigger words that resonate with the user So that it gets users to where they need to be More quickly And without the user having to think about the words too much Because the words are familiar and ‘right’
- Words are important to all of us here though Because core interaction elements like navigation menus, browse categories, embedded links, and call-to-action buttons are all usually made up of words. Users mostly rely on words to see what’s available, what they can do and how they can get around. The predominant mode of navigating is still via words Icons without labels are limited in what they can convey...
- I was at a talk recently when the speaker described how someone had downloaded Skype for the first time And said: “well, I can see something that looks like a hot water bottle”
- And of course most people probably don’t start their journey on your site or service anyway They type some words into Google And these are matched with the words on your site And if the words don’t match People won’t see your content in the search results And chances are they won’t come to your site About 75% of visits to GOV.UK arrive via search If people can’t find your content then they can’t use it And what you call things influences how findable they are in internal search and Google
- When designing the interaction components of an interface It can be easy to overlook the importance of the words. But as I said many UI components are words And we need to make sure we chose these words carefully And use them consistently across the site Not ‘tag’ here and ‘label’ there
- And when designing for Mobile First When space is limited It’s tempting to use the shortest possible words But As Jakob Nielsen said way back Precise words are often better than short words Short words can be too broad to accurately describe what the user’s looking for He gave the example that UX people are more likely to search for the word ‘usability’ than ‘easy’
- However, there are, of course, many different ways of classifying and labelling things And the way we organise and label things affects the people who use these things So how we label and organise things should Depend on our audience And the CONTEXT in which they’re trying to do something When we talk to another person we rely on constant feedback to adjust our communication - it’s interactive We can deal with any confusion by clarifying what we mean In most cases when we’re designing services for users online There’s less context so communication is harder And clear labelling is therefore more important
- So most of us think of a tomato as a vegetable But if you’re a botanist you might think of it firstly as a fruit
- Another aspect of context is level of expertise GOV.UK has content That’s aimed for users with different levels of knowledge about a subject And as you might expect In user research we’ve found that subject matter experts often use different terminology to the general public or non-specialists.
- Does anyone know what pharmacovigilance means?
- It means drug safety So we found from user research that a medical professional would use the word ‘pharmacovigilance’ instead of ‘Drug safety’ And tax specialists are much more likely to talk about ‘Residency’ than ‘Living in the UK’ Subject matter experts tend to talk and think at a different level of detail than non-experts So it’s worth thinking about the the level of knowledge of the users you’re designing for… If you’re designing for experts It’s probably fine to use more specialist, technical language sometimes If you’re confident that’s what works best for them We had over 1,225 searches for the term. pharmacovigilance’ on the site in the last 12 months
- But if you’re designing for non-experts Remember that expert language Is like Gobbledygook, It’s like alien language And it’s a real turn-off Sometimes it’s hard for the experts designing or writing for a general audience To remember what it’s like not to have this knowledge To explain things in away that’s easily understandable to a novice. It can be easy to fall into the trap Of assuming that other people know the same things as you do This is sometimes called ‘the curse of knowledge” So you need to beware of this And make sure you empathise with your non-expert users And AVOID JARGON
- Besides this kind of specialist versus non-specialist knowledge, context can also include culture and emotion, amongst other things
- In terms of culture, While the act of classification is a human universal, the way we do it is not: Different societies use a wide range of classification systems to organise the world. For example, anthropologists have observed that some groups in Africa Seem to divide the world into 3 colour buckets - roughly red, black and white, But some Western cultures use 5 times as many categories for colours. And I recently discovered that Welsh is one of the languages that doesn’t distinguish between blue and green. This is quite an abstract example. But with many of us designing services for global audiences It’s worth bearing this type of thing in mind.
- Another contextual factor is emotion Users come to a site like GOV.UK in the first place because they have an information need Sometimes these can be triggered by stressful life events like what to do when someone in your family dies, or what happens when you’re on long-term sick leave or because you don’t know if you can afford to go back to work after you’ve had a baby
- And under emotional stress your vocabulary shrinks For example, if you’re ill and in a panic You’d say “my chest hurts”, not “I’d like to see a cardiothoracic surgeon please”. So it’s important to use core words in these situations These are the common words a child uses by the time they’re 5 or 6 years old Adults still find these words easier to recognise and understand than words they’ve learned since.
- The words you use And how you categorise things Are also important for creating the right emotional tone Tone is a core part of the user experience, so the site language has to be thought-out, planned and managed
- And here’s an example of a potentially emotive category on GOV.UK We have a browse category called “Disabled people” But Older people, deaf people and other groups included here Often don’t think of themselves as being disabled
- So those are some examples of how you need to understand your users’ context To get the language right But there’s more to it than that --- As I said earlier, everyone has to interact with government sometimes You don’t have any choice Some users will have low literacy. For example, around 10% of the UK population has some degree of dyslexia according to the British Dyslexia Association.
- This screenshot from their website Shows an example of the type of visual stress common in dyslexia
- Other users of GOV.UK won’t have English as their first language. They might be wanting to come to the UK to do business, or work or study and need to find out about visas. And since GOV.UK has to cater for everyone
- For these groups we also need to think about using simple and clear language Using ‘buy’ instead of ‘purchase’, ‘help’ instead of ‘assist’, ‘about’ instead of ‘approximately’ and ‘like’ instead of ‘such as, ‘tell’ instead of ‘inform’ or ‘notify’’. And, as we all know, accessibility is good for everyone.
- So those are some of the reasons why words matter when designing digital experiences. But now I’m going to talk about why there are no easy answers to getting this right.
- Language is tricky It’s often full of acronyms, jargon, slang And in particular the English language has a really rich vocabulary And has very diverse shading of meanings for example, We distinguish between HOUSE and HOME whereas the French do not
- The most problematic aspect for UX Is that, out of context, words are often ambiguous And ambiguity isn’t good for UX What we’re after is clarity And words can be ambiguous in many different ways
- As we saw earlier with the Celebrations, people can use many different words for the same thing Bill Bryson says that no other language has so many synonyms Some of these difference are cultural variations found in US/UK/Australian English, like sweets/candy/lollies, aubergine/eggplant, courgette/zucchini Is anyone here Scottish? Apparently the scottish don’t called scotch pancakes, scotch pancakes they call them drop scones and the australians call them pikelets --- Then we have homonyms - words that mean different things in different contexts On gov.uk turkey can be both a country and a type of poultry Policy can mean various different things - government policy, life insurance policy --- And sometimes in English the same word has ended up with contradictory meanings: [Contronyms]
- For example, on GOV.UK the word sanction has 3 different meanings It can mean a measure forbidding something to be done For example the government bans the export of certain items to certain countries Or it can mean the opposite of that - permission to do something As in the second example And there’s a third meaning of sanction on GOV.UK A government term People on benefits can have their money temporarily stopped or reduced If they don’t do something they’ve agreed to do - like go for a job interview This is also known as a sanction
- And of course another complicating factor Is that language is always changing Words come and go
- New words are being added to the OED all the time - here’s an example from last year The word crowdfunding is starting to crop up in gov.uk content
- And of course words also go out of fashion They can become obsolete Or unacceptable to use in certain contexts For example, Alien was used regularly to describe immigrants before World War Two.
- Although interestingly, the term it is still used in the US to describe someone who is not a U.S. citizen or U.S. national So CONTEXT is everything!
- So, what can we do about this? Although there will never be an absolutely perfect label that Will work for everyone, every time How can we strive to give our users with the least ambiguous, most precise words that will best meet their needs? I’m going to talk about 3 of the techniques we use at GOV.UK And how they can work together and complement each other
- So if we want to make sure the language on the site reflects the language of our users. We can only really do this by learning about them through broad contextual user research at the beginning of a project This kind of bigger picture research is crucial for developing knowledge about users’ information seeking behaviours the trigger words they're looking for and how they understand the subject domain. So it’s not just doing some usability testing before a product is launched to see what they do It’s trying to understand why they do the things they do It’s about developing a deeper understanding of your users What sort of internal map or landscape have they created around a particular topic or task? And what sort of language do they use to describe it? What are their biggest problems? Contextual research can take many forms – visits to people’s homes and places of work, depth interviews in research labs, experience mapping exercises
- This is the number one design principle at GDS - to start with user needs So, in line with this GOV.UK undertook a project last year to understand the needs of parents with young children User researchers visited 16 parents in their homes, Spending 2 hours talking to them about their experiences of having young children and finding childcare. A common theme was that many parents would assume they weren't entitled to any financial support from government without having ever looked into it, even though they were struggling to pay for childcare.
- A common theme was that many parents would assume they weren't entitled to any financial support from government without having ever looked into it, even though they were struggling to pay for childcare.
- Moving on to our second tool A complementary technique is to take a look at search logs You can think of search data as the “voice of your users” It’s another source of user needs. You can use it to find your top user needs and what to call things. These are great for seeing what your users are looking for on your site Expressed in their own language They’re articulating their needs in their search queries Things you can look for include synonyms, acronyms, jargon, new words, length of search queries, common misspellings Knowing this helps you to structure your content and appear higher in search results
- At GOV.UK we’re lucky We have lots of search data Although only about 6% of users use site search That’s still about 5m searches a month In the whole of 2015, there were 66 million searches. And there's a very long tail, with almost 17 million different search terms (queries) used in 2015. We can use all this search data to improve the words on the site so that people can find things more easily
- This is the trending searches dashboard It shows search terms that people are looking for more than usual in GOV.UK site search. This can help us to spot emerging or rising user needs and react quickly to make sure people can find relevant content. The dashboard shows both the searches that are most common so will have the biggest impact and the searches that are important right now, because of seasonal or topical events. We can see that ‘belgium’ and ‘bank holidays’ were trending last week
- Going back to the childcare and parenting example When we looked at GOV.UK search terms for 6 months We could see a cluster of terms around the concept of ‘help with childcare’ So we can see there’s a user need around this
- Another example Was after content about UK Visas and Immigration was migrated to GOV.UK in 2014 In Google Analytics, we could see that lots of users were searching for the term “spouse visa” This is an outdated term And it hadn’t been included in the content because from a policy point of view it’s not accurate But on the basis of this finding it got added to the content And searches for spouse visa went down by about 40% over the next 2 weeks
- We also included the term “spouse visa” in the browse category description text to provide good information scent In user research we’ve found that the words included in these category descriptions are heavily used and give users some useful context about where to look. We’ve seen that users frequently select browse categories based on keywords noticed in the description.
- We can also use data about on-pages searches to see how well users’ information needs are being met by that page. This can highlight problems if users aren’t finding what they wanted on that particular page.
- For example, this is the searches fees and forms browse page for content about land registration. On-page searches for the previous version of the page were showing that users were searching for both forms in general and for the AP1 form in particular. So we moved them higher up the page. And on pages searches for these terms went down significantly.
- However, if you don’t have access to internal search terms Or you’re creating content from scratch You can also use free tools that show what people are searching for in Google and other search engines Unfortunately in 2011, Google stopped providing search term data from anyone signed into a Google service. So there’s less data in Google Analytics than there used to be about search terms that led users to content from Google. For example, When GOV.UK had to create a page about taking holiday from work Content designers thought that ‘Annual leave’ would be a good plain English title But it turned out that a lot more people were searching for ‘Holiday entitlement” (using Google Trends) Holiday entitlement is in red, annual leave is the blue line So they changed the title to ‘Holiday entitlement’ but also included “annual leave” in the first paragraph, as there are still lots of people searching for that
- In Google this piece of content comes up first for both of these search terms
- Another way to obtain search terms is to use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to see what terms people are searching for Here’s a search for childcare, filtered to UK only Ordered by average monthly searches Again, we can see ‘free childcare’ is a common search term You can download these results as CVS files and then do some analysis on them
- The third technique I’m going to talk about is card sorting This is when you can more specifically align the content you have with the mental models of your users Card sorting is a key tool of the trade for IAs It helps us to understand how users organise content in a particular domain And what they call those groupings Participants can create their own categories and labels (open card sorting) But you can also do closed cards sorts with a predefined set of labels Which is a good exercise to test how well those labels work
- We did OPEN online card sorting of relevant GOV.UK content for the childcare project Using some software called Optimal Sort From the results, we could see that there are some really strong groups around education, adoption/fostering/surrogacy, information when expecting a baby, and childcare. However, consistent with the rest of the research findings, there were no obvious groupings for the content about financial help The similarity matrix shown here shows how often any 2 cards were grouped together. The darker the blue where two cards intersect, the more often they were paired together by participants. If we look at one example relating to financial help here ‘care to learn’ is a scheme that can help with childcare costs for parents who are studying But only less than 50% of participants grouped it together with “help with childcare costs”, which is quite a weak connection Probably because most participants didn’t know what it was And that probably generally reflects parents lack of knowledge about what financial help is available
- You might be put off doing card sorting because you think you need to come up with statistically significant results But don’t be It’s more about looking for patterns and insights in the data Just make sure you have enough users to reveal enough differences and similarities to help you make decisions Although it’s good to have large sample sizes if you can We had 98 parents participating in the card sorting study You can do it on a low budget with a small number of participants using index cards and post-its and still get insightful results As with any type of user research it’s important that you chose your participants carefully So that they are actually representative of your users
- So, all these tools have their strengths and weaknesses It’s good to mix qual and quant techniques if you can The quant (search logs) tells you the what but not the why They all take time - but like all user research, the benefits should always outweigh the costs if the activities are well planned and run It’s important to make sure you have enough time to analyse your findings
- So drawing all the strands of research together for the childcare and parenting project We could see from the contextual research that new parents are often struggling to find an affordable way to go back to work But don’t know what financial assistance they might be entitled to The search logs show a lot of searches for terms relating to “help with childcare” And card sorting found no obvious groupings for the content about financial help So we came up with a new draft IA which included a category for Financial help And validated this with a tree test This consistency plenty of evidence to support the creation of a new browse category on the site Financial help if you have children Which pulls together all the relevant information in one place So that parents can see all the options available to help “Financial help” is the key language trigger here
- Key message = Make sure you think about words as much as the other components of your UX Because they really do matter