Dean Vipond gave an entertaining and interesting talk at Future of Web Design, Leeds last Wednesday. He was looking at ways in which a website can have personality and how that helps to make the user feel engaged. Perhaps the ****ing amazon example he gave would require some thought, but I did notice one myself recently. On Google, there is an ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. Of course, most usability peeople might say the button should explain what it does. According to the Google website, this button “automatically takes you to the first web page returned for your query.” So the button, it it was literal, would say ‘top ranked page.’ But I think the slightly less formal wording works well in this content.

It made me wonder if there are other sites which should be slightly less formal but aren’t. But it’s a risky business. There’s a thin line between being friendly and being pretentious. Imagine an online bank which, instead of saying, “your bank accounts” said “hiya chuck, do u wanna see how much dosh you’ve got left (& panic if ur out of cash lol).” It’s really not going to work. But I do think we could make the language of the web a little less dry.

Of course, language which is less dry needs to be plain English if anyone is going to access your site who is not local or a native speaker. For example, I’m from Manchester and I can say “Manchester is dead good” meaning “Manchester is very good”. If you didn’t know that dead means very, you might look it up and would still have no clue unless you knew to look in a Mancunian dictionary, and even then you’d find out that dead can also mean ‘finished’, as in, “is that drink dead?”

So, I was really pleased at Dean’s presentation. A great reminder that language doesn’t have to be too literal, we can add a little warmth and humanity. More so if the website is personalised. For example, a label called ‘Show Calculator Tool’ may be strictly correct, because if I press the button, the calculator button does indeed display. However, the more human ‘Show Me How Much I Can Save&rsquo, although it doesn’t strictly describe what happens, explains the button more clearly, because it describes the purpose of the tool so I can get what it’s about without having to open it up.

Of course, all this requires a huge amount of time and effort, and when planning projects, this needs to be considered. I do think that a lot of usability problems could be solved with clearer labelling, whereas most people’s response when users don’t understand a form is to add more and more explanatory text until the website becomes a mass of confusion. Less is more, as long as the label is appropriate. And thinking in terms of personality can really help this process.