Posts About Unsuck
Unsuck It: Advice Edition
We’ve kept busy busting some grim language (mis)uses over at Unsuck It. We’ve also added a few audio samples to better capture that douche-croon—use headphones if you’re aching for an intimate encounter—with more voices to come in the future. In the meantime, we’re pleased to announce the new Unsuck It blog, Necessary Trouble, slated to launch in the next couple weeks. We’ll cover how language shapes thought, how good diction makes good sentences, and how phrase X slaughters editorial decency.
Here’s where you come in. As part of the blog, we want to run an advice column, and we need your questions to do so. Got a linguistic quandary? Can’t figure out why a sentence leaves you cold or in what context to use a certain tone? Send these and any questions to troubled@muledesign.com, and we’ll try our hand at helping out.
Written by Tina Lee on June 15, 2011 with 0 comments | 
Introducing: Unsuck It Post-it Notes
Sick of your coworker using jargon? Annoyed by the douchenuggets your boss leaves around the office?
Get the all-new Unsuck It Post-it Notes and quit your douchin’.
To get yours, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope with $1.00 to:
Mule Design Studio
300 Brannan Street #201
San Francisco, CA 94107
**While supplies last. Each pad comes with 25 notes. Mule is not responsible for your job security or popularity.
Written by Nicole Jones on October 4, 2010 with 2 comments |
“Working Hours” Unsucked
I love what I do for a living, and I love the people I work with. We strive to maintain the environment that allows us to have the best time doing the best work.
However, every single day a bitter resource war rages in our office. At stake is our precious, finite time.
We each have our own responsibilities and deadlines. It is also essential that we collaborate and communicate with each other throughout the day. Let’s call these opposing claimants “work” and “meetings”.
This battle plays out on Google Calendar. When I opened it this morning to assess the state of things, a chipper new feature announcement greeted me:
At first I was confused, then super annoyed. My “working hours” are the times it’s OK for other people to invite me to events? Oh, heck no. To a person on deadline, a calendar invitation is a hostile land grab.
Even though we do work with a lot of folks in other time zones which can be tricky to track, this is solving the opposite of our thorniest problem. In fact, it is enshrining in the interface just the attitude we are trying to combat, that work is defined by meetings—or, euphemistically, “events.” Events are what I attend outside of work.
My working time should belong to me. Please Google, don’t strip me of that illusion.
A simple change in nomenclature to “Available to meet” would feel way more respectful and accurate, and this is the direction we entreat business communication to go.
Written by Erika Hall on August 26, 2010 with 2 comments |
Super Unsuck It! Bye-Bye, My.
In the immortal words of Armand Van Helden:
My my my (my my my)
Woh (woh)
How did we ever get this way?
Where’s it gonna go?
When designing an interface in 2010, would you copy Windows 95? Would you copy Yahoo!’s copy of Windows 95?
Many people are still doing just that, and we want them to stop.
How did we ever get this way?
In the beginning, there was My Computer, and then there was My Yahoo! Then, like mushrooms after a rain, a million mindless imitators emerged.
These sites didn’t just use My in the brand like My Yahoo! or MySpace. My came to preface any interface element inviting personalization.
In their excellent Design Pattern Library, the Yahoo! Developer Network explains the heart of the problem their parent created. Instead of reinforcing a sense of ownership and agency, this unnatural locution feels presumptuous and alienating.
It is as if the user has printed out labels and stuck them to various objects: My Lunch, My Desk, My Red Stapler. Except the user hasn’t done this; you (the site) did it for them.
This is lazy design and branding. It’s bad style. And it sucks. So, let’s unsuck it!
Where’s it gonna go? Away.
The site or app speaks in the first person plural “we”. (In general, “I” takes you to that creepy HAL 9000 place. It’s the uncanny pronoun. Avoid.) The interface addresses the reader as “you”, or by name.
Things belonging to the people who run the site, such as a privacy policy, are “ours”. Things belonging to the user, such as a profile, are “yours”. Anything that is just a part of the overall experience, doesn’t necessarily need a possessive pronoun at all.
That’s all you need to know. Go forth and suck no more.
Additional persuasion to help you break the habit
Writing interface language is like writing dialog for a play. You want to make it clear who is speaking at all times. Being clear, as well as appropriately conversational, goes a long way towards making the whole experience engaging and successful.
Mint.com receives a lot of praise for their design. Many of those good interface design decisions are language decisions.
It’s not Mamet, but this construction adds humanity and a sense of service.
Sometimes you need to give the user their lines for their part of the interaction. Typically this takes the form of a button or otherwise selectable statement.
Here’s a swell example of some complexity from YouTube:
So far, so good. But what about the persistent labels for objects you want your users to own? We can torture the metaphor a little more and call them the props. Well, if we are talking to you, then these things are yours.
So natural! So friendly! So easy to maintain a helpful consistency.
It’s perfectly fine to use no pronoun at all. Plenty of websites get by just fine with an “Account” tab. Even Microsoft has relabeled the traditional My Computer icon to Computer with the introduction of Vista.
But if you don’t follow this guideline, if you succumb to the peculiar temptation of my, you just set yourself up for totally unnecessary inconsistency.
And, should you decide to brand a whole section of your site with “My”, you aren’t really branding the experience at all. You are inviting your users to draw an analogy with something another company did over a decade ago. It’s a missed opportunity, and that sucks.
Written by Erika Hall on June 8, 2010 with 14 comments |
