Making Your Web Apps More Human

I was reading a post on Luke Wroblewski's blog recapping a presentation on "Designing Humanity in to Your Products" at the Web App Summit 2009 and it got me thinking about the tensions I often find in creating the text for the Web applications I build.

We have an interdisciplinary team responsible for all the educational and training content developed at my place of work. They're very smart, talented people who know a lot about their specific area of expertise. Over time, we've settled on a writing style that's, well, a bit formal. We're an academic institution, after all, and the Chicago Manual of Style is pretty clear on how words should be crafted for the page.

The problem with sticking to a standard like Chicago is twofold:

1. We're on the Web, not the page. The Web really is different from the printed page.
2. Web 2.0 experiences are fast becoming (if not already) the standard. Users expect to be referred to in the first or second person. Users expect to take center stage in all the activities available in a Web app. They expect the casual, conversational style of Facebook to be how all Web apps should work.

I'm not trying to single out the technical writers and editors that we have on our team. They're great and really know what they're doing. I'm also not abdicating the basic rules of academic writing to Facebook or IM style. (I teach an online course at a graduate institution, after all, and I see how lazy students can be when it comes to writing.) What I am trying to point out is that often when we generate the text for our Web applications, we're bound by a sense of obligation to "proper style" or "business tone" that's so formal it only reinforces the stereotype that computers (and by extension, the Web applications that run on computers) are so devoid of anything resembling personality or idiosyncratic style that we can't, fundamentally, connect with them.

Part of the success of Facebook or Twitter or any number of Web 2.0 sites is the way in which they approach the user: a friendly, conversational tone with human-readable (and understandable) messages. As pointed out in the blog post, we need to take a conversational rather than formal tone, especially when it comes to error messages or other "system guidance" to users. This may result in a site with a less authoritative (as in totalitarian) voice, but the benefit is that users feel assisted, not punished, when they need to ask a question or something goes wrong.

As I've been implementing newer apps, and those using my Contextual Guidance API, I've made a conscious effort to keep the tone less formal and more conversational. This has resulted in a few discussions about what's appropriate (contractions seem to be a sticking point), but I think the upshot are apps that are more approachable and, by extension, more human. People have such limited time to get anything that they don't see as non-essential done, it's important to make them feel that they're dealing with an app made by humans, for humans.