Wording

Purpose

Every word displayed in an application is part of a conversation with users. This conversation is an opportunity to provide clarity and to help people feel comfortable in the system.

Guidelines

• Use terminology that is familiar and easy to understand for the target audience (i.e. Persona) of your application.

• Start your sentence with the most important objective first.

• Use short words, active verbs and common nouns.

• Avoid Contractions such as “Don’t”, “Won’t”, etc.

• Avoid abbreviations (including ampersand instead of ‘and’), acronyms, and tech-babble.

• Use an informal and friendly tone, but not too informal or humorous.

• Avoid popular, but transient, words and phrases.

• Keep information short and consistent; avoid redundancy or wordiness. e.g. Don’t repeat the dialog title in the dialog text.

• Don’t abuse Capitalization because it draws people’s attention.

• For date and time information, consider that your app may potentially be used for several years; don’t use immutable date references like this year unless it is algorithmically determined.

• Follow system-wide wording conventions for basic functions to keep wording consistent.

• In general, exclamation points should be used sparingly in user-interface strings. In particular, they should not be used for error messages, to avoid an effect upon the user similar to WRITING IN ALL-CAPS.