Wednesday, 9 November 2005
09:44 PM
Looking at an article from Mike Gunderloy ("Everything You Know About UI Design Is Wrong") got me to download the Microsoft Vista User Experience guidelines. What interests me most at the moment, not surprisingly, are the guidelines for creating UI text.
The fact that there are quasi-official guidelines for creating UI text is itself interesting. I might be horribly mistaken here, but I don't know that MS published anything official-like about how to write your captions and error messages. They even have a name for it: The Microsoft® Windows Vista™ tone.
For anyone who's paid much attention to issues of UI text, many the guidelines are not surprising. For that matter, if you've ever read an article on writing clearly, the suggestions will sound quite familiar. Not that this is a negative; on the contrary, telling UI text writers explicitly to address the user as you, use the active voice, "omit needless adverbs" (to slightly misquote Strunk & White), etc, is all good.
There are more abstract guidelines than just good grammar, though. The guidelines try in various ways (sometimes explicitly) to encourage writing that sounds like a real person: avoid words you wouldn’t say to someone else in person. Or be polite, supportive, and encouraging. These suggestions are illustrated with examples that show correct/incorrect and acceptable/better.
There are some suggestions that to me as a doc writer would take some getting used to, because they're not in the style we've had drummed into us. For example, they encourage contractions, which are stricly verboten in our docs (though not at Microsoft Press; I don't know MSDN's policy). They have some guidelines for using two words you'll never find in our docs today: we and sorry. Example: We’re sorry, but Windows detected an unrecoverable problem and was shut down. Messages like this seem so ... daring.
Scott Hanselman spotted (#) this change in UI tone with Microsoft Max, which must be using the Vista UX guidelines already. This is cool.
About the only thing I'm left wondering is this: why don't these guidelines apply to written documentation as well? Or will they?
[categories]
language, technology, work, writing
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