Secondary Orality
Erica Hall of Mule Design gave her presentation on Copy as Interface last Friday at Six Apart. There were some pretty interesting concepts she shared.
The main concept is that words are a very important part of an interface and seriously effect the feelings users experience when using a site.
She pointed out that in an interface "we aren't writing, we are speaking in text". She had an interesting slide noting that before literacy we had an oral tradition, now we are evolving to a "secondary orality" as she put it.
Oral Culture --> Literacy --> Secondary Orality
She offered some guidelines when choosing how to speak in a user interface....
Five ways to get words right:
- Be authentic
- Be engaging
- Be specific
- Be appropriate
- Be polite
7 things to avoid
- Vague
- (Too) Clever
- Rude
- Obvious
- Inconsistent
- Presumptious
- Unnatural
Copy as Interface Slides on Slideshare - A longer review of the presentation
Comments
I was thinking a similar thing. These days, what I search is where I travel, what I buy, what I read, etc, etc. And to get better search results, I need to know "proper and specific keywords".
Writing a blog about something I like, it helps to gain my own expression and keywords to seach. Ability to express oneself with proper words can be some kind of "Literacy" to live better with the web.