So
So I had the pleasure of introducing our next speaker, Rick Allen, Rick, Ricken on, is a principal content designer for performer an agency that designs creative solutions and builds technology.
Products that elevate human needs. He has over 15 years of experience working on the web as a brand and content strategies and information.
Architect at performer. He works with government agencies, nonprofits, and cause-based organizations on Ux writing and content strategy to create human-centered content.
That's easy to find use and understand. So welcome, Rick. We're really looking forward to this presentation and excited about your content.
Great thank you so much. Let me share my screen
Am I sharing my screen? Okay?
Yes, you are
Thank you so much. Wow! Welcome! Everybody! Hope, you are all enjoying the event.
My name is Rick. Whether you are a researcher or Ux designer or product designer, or nger, or or really, if you present share or publish information internally or externally, in your role like I imagine many of you do you are a content creator and you
are a professional communicator, and that's why I'm happier here.
This is a talk for all of us in all our different roles.
As for me, as you heard, I'm a content designer at a company called Co.
Forma, my professional background is in branding content, strategy, and information.
Architecture. If you go back further than that, my academic background is in writing and publishing, and you might think that studying writing in college would make me well suited to give a talk on on plain language, but honestly there's a lot.
That I had to unlearn, to write effectively for digital experiences and I'll get into that ready for the web initial experiences is not just about storytelling and communication it's about usability and inclusivity and that brings us to this topic of plain language or as I like to call
It plain talk? And why do's relevant for web for world usability day, and so important for the health of those that we communicate with
Plain language is needed to improve health literacy which the Cdc.
Describes here as the degree to which individuals have the ability to find understand and use information and services to inform health related decisions.
And as for themselves in others, so this is a big deal.
In fact, research shows that inadequate health literacy more strongly predicts health status.
Then age, income, education, or race. So this is the impact of plain language on our health and those that we communicate with.
But before explaining plain language anymore, more, I'd like to first define another term, so that we're all in the right mindset. For this conversation
Content. What is what is the purpose of content right? This includes titles and web text and images and captions and videos and audio, even metadata, and image. Alt text that's all content the purpose of content is to communicate in fact anything that communicates his content so now that we've got this one down
What is the purpose of plain language.
The purpose of playing language is to help people understand. So that's what this talk is about.
How can we help people understand.
Our third author, George Bernard Shaw. Once wrote the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place when we create content.
We have our intended meaning. We have this message that we're trying to get across this idea right.
But the likelihood that our message is understood as intended, is actually very low, because we all attribute to different meanings to the words that we use to the words that I'm using right now we think about them differently based on our experience and view of the world and education and other lots of other
Aspects. I wanted to take one step to step out of health for the moment with an example to kind of help illustrate this so this is a description found on the about page of a company website this is from a few years ago, some May not show up if you start Google in right
Now, but it reads our business, help small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect with our customers, clients, and members.
Launched in 1998, our business champions, the needs of small organizations, and provides them with an easy and affordable way to build successful lasting customer relationships
Can you tell me what they do? You know I mean just the basics like you know what is their product or service?
No, the if the purpose of content is to communicate what is what is this saying?
What is this telling you? Is it communicating, helpful, friendly, relatable
This company is constant contact, and if you're not familiar with them you'll, you'll see with the comparison.
I'm gonna show you in a second what they do.
Let's look at another example also from the about page of a company website.
We're a team of about a 110 developers, designers, professional problem solvers, tinkers and takeout critics. We're gonna round on the clock to make our business the best email marketing service in the universe
Hey, can anyone tell me what they do? Right? It's email marketing.
But what else does this communicate? It also communicates, maybe that they're helpful, friendly, relatable.
Maybe that their customer centered or trustworthy.
This message is half the size of the other one, and says a lot more, and conveys messaging beyond those individual words.
I think this is good storytelling, but this is also not plain, language.
This is Mailchimp, by the way, which offers similar services to constant contact.
But communicates very differently, as I think you can see the reason.
This is not plain. Language is that it contains uncommon terms to communicate that they're fun and reliable, but they're not explicit.
About it, considering different backgrounds, cultures. This can be hard to understand.
I mean what? What is a takeout critic
Here is a more plain talk version of that mail Chimp message, and this is not the only way that it could be written.
Ultimately what you say is based on your communication goals with this example.
I'm inferring that their communication goals are that they are fun, helpful and and modern but we could infer from the previous description that there are other qualities as well.
Again. I think they're they're fun storytellers, but at least in this case it's not plain language.
Communication that is not explicit that leaves room for interpretation is not playing talk because it's not usable and inclusive to broad audiences.
So this is a, you know, a silly example, but plain language is a serious problem.
Plain language, determines whether taxpayers understand how to save money on their taxes as tax laws, change plain language, determines whether American citizens understand where to go, and how to report a civil rights violation. Plain language determines whether international students understand how to get a visa to study in the us
Plain language determines whether us students and their families understand how to complete the 200 question. Fafsa financial aid application
Plain language can be the difference between someone getting accepted into college or not, and burning it all back to health, right?
Plain language determines whether parents understand how to safely vaccinate their children
You can find a common definition of plain language on plain language.
Dot gov. Which says that plain language means your target audience can find what they need.
Understand what they find the first time they read it or hear it, and use what they find to meet their needs.
I kind of challenge you to ask yourself these questions when you're looking up health information, ask yourself, is it easy to find what I'm looking for?
Do I understand what I find the first time that I read it?
Am I able to use what I find to meet with my needs.
Then imagine how it might be challenging for someone else in a different situation.
Different background, different understandings. Health information is is often complex. It's not easy to make it simple, but that's our goal.
These are our core elements of plain language. Storytelling is writing and communication.
This is the what you want to say with your words usability is the how how people find and use information
Inclusivity is about diversity and accessibility, and ensuring information is available to everyone who needs it.
Inclusively speaks to why we need plain language. If inclusivity was not a concern, we wouldn't need plan language instead.
This would just be a talk about writing for the web, or you. X. Writing
Inclusivity also referred to as universal design, and designed for all addresses.
A broad range of issues, such as accessibility for people with disabilities access to and quality of hardware, software and internet to connectivity, computer literacy and skills economic situation, education, geographic location, culture, age including older ann younger people, language, and many others
So there's a lot of goods, plain language, checklists out there, and I'm gonna have some resources at the end to share with you.
But perhaps more important is the mindset our approach, our a way of thinking about plain language in the work that we do every day in our.
These are some ideas for keeping plain language top of mind, and they'd like to kind of talk through with you
Know your audience. Be helpful, be straightforward and use meaningful words
Number one: know your audience: that's always the rule in communication right not to mention human center design.
Wait. Language isn't just about the practice of writing a simple conversational way.
We need to use words that are meaningful and understandable to our intended audience to do that to ensure our audience understands.
We need to understand what they already know, and what they still need to know.
In other words, where are they in their education? On this topic?
And what do they care about? What are their values? What are their experiences that contribute to their understanding of what we're communicating? Plain language requires this recent
A general plan language guideline is to write for your target audience and right cause.
Plain language is not intended to be the you know, for absolutely everyone in all cases right.
That's an impossible task for all of us in our roles.
However, Content does not live in a silo. It's nearly always part of a broader experience, and it's equally important for people to understand what's not for them as it is to understand what is for them and that's why plain language is always important
Literacy is often used to evaluate user comprehension at different levels.
Now this doesn't replace the need for targeted research.
But some of this data provides some helpful context for general audience for us to kind of you know.
Get our heads around this this the impact of importance of this, so that the program for the international assessment of adult competencies is an international large-scale survey with a direct assessment of literacy numeracy and digital problems solving and a background engineer on education work experience and training skill use at
Work and at home, demographics, income, health and civic participation.
Quick definition here of literacy, right understanding of the evaluating, using and engaging with written text, to participate in society, to achieve one's goals and to develop ones.
Knowledge and potential the program for international assessment of adult competencies looks at it.
Literacy, numeracy and digital problem, solving in terms of real-world uses and the ability to engage in society rather than more kind of academic use cases.
So this chart shows the percentage of adults age 16 to 65 at each level of literacy, proficiency in the United States 23% are below level 1 41% are at level 1 31% are at level 2 in 5% are at level.
3 that the circle, the yellow circle that you see around those first 2 sections is they circle that in this diagram to indicate that those are the people that are at risk of not being able to understand and accomplish their tasks right 64% are not are in that
Category at risk 31% from the category of struggling, and only 5% of us people are are in the category of sufficient only 5% of the us population is likely to easily accomplish those tasks.
So so this is the landscape. We're not talking about edge cases here.
We're not talking about. We're talking about the far, far majority of Americans and people around the world
Approximately 112 million adults are at or below level.
2 in literacy, and of those 40 million are at or below level.
One. These stats spread wildly across demographics, such as age, native non-native speakers, employment, education, gender, race, ethnicity region.
This spreads across a wide range of of demographics.
But this is not just about low literacy users. I mean that that's often.
This is often how we kind of take the picture about the the need for plain language, but it's it's implications and value.
Extend, you know, far beyond that. Remember we're talking about universal design, and when you write in plain talk you're not dumbing down content you're you're making it easier for everyone and you can see the difference.
Study is like the one here. Reference are shown that making your content easier to understanding for low-level users makes it more usable for all audiences.
So what you see in this in this table here is the first part is task success percentage.
And for this study it's showing low literacy and high literacy web users before plane language was applied, and with plan language so for low literacy web users without playing language, in the study 46% of people were able to accomplish tasks with plain language 82%
Huge jump, but with high literacy web users without planning.
Language. It was 68%, and with plain language it jumped in 93%
Similarly with time spent in minutes a couple of weeks without playing language and with planning language.
For low literacy users. It was a difference between 22 min and 9 min for high latency web users.
It was a difference between 14 min and 5 min
Just check in quickly on the on the comments there
So my my second suggestion here is to focus on being helpful
This plays out in lots of different ways. It starts with our voice and tone.
How are we perceived? If we want to be perceived as helpful, we need to use a helpful tone to convey that, and an overly professional or technical tone will not convey that same message
Right we want to be a teacher to help people understand and guide them to where they need to go.
Can organize and label content in an intuitive way to make content easy to find and make content scannable and easy to read with titles and headings and lists and inline links and we're gonna get into some of those examples, in a few minutes.
Beyond having a helpful tone another way that we are helpful is how we organize structure and label information despite where we are right now.
In the digital age. We still write content as if it's a printed page.
We're right. Assuming that people are reading from top to bottom like a book which is the farthest thing from reality.
This graphic need to be familiar to some of you. This is from Steve proves classic book on usability.
Don't make me think right on the left hand side.
You see what we designed for, and on the right hand side is the reality.
What we designed for is that people are carefully reading everything that we have on the page, and then making a decisive decision to click on a certain link 3.
Reality being that people are feverishly looking around for anything that resembles what they're looking for, and is clickable, and as soon as they find a halfway decent match they click and if it doesn't pay out they click the back button and try again
One example of how we write in a way that resembles print.
Content is. Where, for example, we only spell out the acronym on a page.
Once right in these instances we're assuming people read the page from top to bottom and in other instances we're writing, assuming that people have read previous pages, what what people are doing what we do when reading a web page is try to determine as quickly as possible, if this is relevant and
Useful if the answer to that question is at the bottom of the page.
People need to work hard to get that answer. And what happens more often is that people give up before finding the answer.
People want to make sense of information as quickly as possible. They're asking is this for me?
Hey? Well, I see your comments there are not wanting to lose track of them.
I just want to standard my timeline, but I even hold on to those comments, and like to get back to them.
Thank you. For thank you for the comment there, right for user tasks.
This is one of those things, I had to unlearn from my kind of formal education in creative writing and academic writing.
You use a narrative style right you provide some backgrounds, rationale some history, and then you guide people through the narrative to tell the story you wanted to tell in many ways.
This this approach is really written for you as the author, and organizing information in a way that makes sense to you what we need to do is adopt a task-oriented style where we put the main points first we're answering questions in order that's logical to the users and
Then possibly provide some history and background. If it's appropriate for or needed, we're valuable.
This approach is not new. It's it's called an inverted pyramid, which is a journalistic approach where you put the most important information.
First, so people know what they can expect right. We know the phrase like don't bare the lead. We don't want to vary the lead
People need to understand before they can act. They can't complete tasks that they don't understand.
They can't manage their health care if they don't understand
Let's talk about scanning for a moment. This is there's this myth that people don't read online what people are actually saying when they say this is that people don't read, what I want them.
To read. People will read if the information is relevant and useful, being able to easily scan a page to answer the questions, What is this about?
Is this for me? Is this what I want? Scanning helps people understand the contents of a page, help your under audience, understand? If content is relevant and valuable, and these are what I kind of call scanning elements things like titles and headings and links in bold text and lists and
photos and graphics and captions and polkids, all those things that kind of stand out on the page where there's scanning elements a quick little skinability test that you can do on your own content or on others is trying to read a page from a distance while only looking at the scanning
elements, and then ask, Who's the target audience, right? What is the purpose?
What information will I find here? What actions can I take
My third. Suggestion is to be straightforward
Be purposeful and up for with clear titles and introductions.
So people understand what the content is about as we touched on earlier.
If readers can't tell really on what's on the page, they can't easily determine if it's relevant and and useful.
He, concise and careful to
Only include words that are necessary, unnecessary words are clutter and can kind of hinder user comprehension being upfront and trustworthy information that is easy to understand and you use is more trustworthy than complex information that was by opening to me when I first
Appreciated that
Right like you talk to be professional and human. There is a misconception in the professional tone.
Requires sophisticated language, and that appearing human means being casual.
That's not true. We we can be both professional and human, and that's what our goal should be.
That's what that's my goal is right now.
And then this idea simplify complex ideas with photos, infographics, and videos. Sometimes words are not the best way to communicate an idea and understanding that is important too
Because of time. I'm not gonna spend too much too much kind of going over these examples here, but but what you can see here is examples of more complex words that we we generally use, and see every day when there's much more clear system words to to use instead instead of at a later, time we
just say later, instead of in order to just say to, and then, in instances of like, be advised or going forward, which I I hear a lot in my work. Those are things that you can generally just omit altogether
One of the things that causes unnecessary words is adverbs, because the famous quote from Stephen King: right: the road to hell is paved with adverbs that you know that's that's that's overstating and I think a bit but but the point well, taken.
Right that the same very large, and we could just say huge or very, same, very small.
On sort of saying, Tiny, right. All of these extra words that we have in our text make it harder for people to easily scan, read and understand what we're writing
And this last suggestion here that I want to touch on is is using meaningful words.
This is about using common language in terms consistently to simplifying meaning, and communicate clearly in addition to using common language in terms, it's important to use them consistently when you use different words to describe the same idea they're kind of undermining your efforts
Use active voice to patch the action to the actor to be direct into the point, right meaningful titles and headings that accurately describe the contents that's being introduced to contents being introduced use descriptive link text 200 people understand the purpose and value of the destination page
Right, some more examples here everyday jargon that we see every day, and what we actually mean when we say that if if you're working in a in user experience in design, these are or an agency or any kind of organization like that you are probably words that you're familiar with and see pretty often like i do
which is, you know, alignment, or in deep dive level, set leverage socialize, synergize.
When we just say cooperate or utilize instead of just thing, use
And handly author of everybody writes: This writing is littered with revolutionary value.
Added impactful cutting edge. Best of breed go to I needed words designed to leverage and incentivize and synergize the current paradigm. Right? That is what we want to avoid
No descriptive link text is something that I could easily spend an hour just talking about.
This because it's such a huge problem. But for this moment I'm just gonna kind of say that we want to be very mindful of link text that this isn't this is a scanning element. When people.
Are scanning a page. This is one of the most prominent scanning elements, and when people are trying to make sense of a page and if it's relevant.
And helpful for them. They need to understand what's on the other side of that link, and we don't want them to have to read all the contents of the page to make sense of that link, right so things like click here.
Website homepage. Learn more download. These are all things.
These are all examples of non descriptive, linked text
Right click here and learn more or very common examples of non-discriptive link text.
I need to be done, of course, by like click here, to learn more
So kind of wrapping up here, Nakov Benton, the author of Nicely said, says Plaintiff, is a step toward a more understandable, trustworthy, and inclusive government.
Language is not just ux writing. It's not just usability.
It's not just accessibility. It's a practice that is guiding a culture change.
A culture shift a culture where government and health care is more understandable, trustworthy, and inclusive
We are the ones, all of us that are kind of guiding that culture change.
Now great writing has always meant focusing on your audience to communicate clearly where the shift in thinking occurs for designers and content.
Creators alike is taking on the role of customer service
It's not enough to simply publish useful information to be usable.
Content must also be findable and understandable and actionable, and that means thinking beyond the words on the page to consider how people experience that content when they need it. Viewing our content through the lens of plain language the real question we're all asking ourselves is how can I help
Thanks, so much
That's what I got. I also have in slide deck some they you're have later some examples of of like learning resources on this topic, and happy to talk a little bit more about those 2.
In the breakout session
Thanks so well, thank you, Rick. That was phenomenal, please.
Sure.
I think