The Importance Of Interface Text (part 1) (
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The words that a user sees on your application's menus and labels
are often as important as the code that drives the application. Using the
wrong word, or a term that is ambiguous or hard to understand, can often
make the difference between an application that is easy and fun to use, and
one that is just plain irritating. This article discusses the importance of
interface text and offers tips and advice to help you create clear, usable
and easily comprehensible text for your application's user interface.A huge part of your application's success lies in how far it succeeds in making
your users feel "I think I know what to do with this thing." And since you are,
after all, developing an application around their needs, making sure the flow is
built around a process they are already familiar with, it would be easy to
assume that they would take to the application naturally.
Easy, but not
correct.
Users approach any new tool with trepidation because it is, in
essence, a whole new way of working. While you, as a developer, are looking at
the application as a compilation of functions that they already know how to
perform, the users look at it as a combination of screens that they know nothing
about. The only thing that can bridge the gap between what they know and what
they see is familiarity, and the easiest medium to make them familiar with the
application is via the words they see on the application's user interface.
Interface text, in other words.
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