Speak your users' language

Editor's Notes

• #3: Show of hands! Some of you have never made pancakes? Come on, people, my 10-year-old makes pancakes.
• #4: Right. Flip them over. No one likes half raw pancakes.
• #5: Other than strong and graceful wrist action. What do you call that kitchen implement?
• #6: Raise your hands: Who calls that a spatula?
• #7: Who calls it a turner?
• #8: Who calls it a flipper? Interesting. (acknowledge the relative proportion of responses.)
• #9: For several years, I was the content strategist and UX team of one at Sur La Table. If you're not familiar with Sur La Table, they're the second-largest specialty cookware retailer in the US, after Williams-Sonoma. So, not as big as Target or Bed Bath and Beyond or Amazon, but 100+ stores in cities across the US. Including Minneapolis! You can stop by before you leave town, and they’re not even paying me to say that.
• #10: ANYWAY, when I started at Sur La Table, we called them (internally and externally) "turners." Because the people who make them tend to call them "turners."
• #11: Note that "turner" is not the "correct" term. It’s the industry term. “Spatula” is an older word in this context. And, if you geek out about the history of the tool, a turner is just a specialized kind of spatula, which is why so many people call them spatulas.
• #12: In my experience, more than 60% of people say “spatula” unless they’ve been brainwashed by the turner industry.
• #13: This and the pancake-flipping thingy are both spatulas, to a majority of customers.
• #14: This leads to an interesting puzzle, from an e-commerce perspective.
• #16: Two completely different sections on the website. Spatulas were on a page here, turners were on their own page somewhere else. (Though they all lived under cooks' tools.) Also note: we did not use the word “flippers” at all. Sorry, die-hard flipper fans.
• #17: Let’s look at a second example of word slipperiness.
• #20: Specifically, Le Creuset, who are famous for their enameled cookware and a Big Deal in the cookware biz, used to call this product a French oven. (Though I've noticed on their own website that they bowed to convention and now use the term Dutch oven.)
• #22: When we're selling someone's product, who are we to change the actual product name?
• #23: And who are we to deny people their Dutch ovens, even if they’re called a French oven?
• #26: I'm not privy to why, but I'd guess that at least part of the reason is they want the search traffic and recognized what terms people are actually using. One more example of word slipperiness.
• #27: Kosher salt and sea salt don't fit through the holes in an ordinary shaker, after all. Any ideas what product you'd look for?
• #28: These are the most common terms for a tabletop salt serving vessel. There are probably more.
• #30: People search for “salt cellar” more often than “salt box” or “salt keeper,” or, my favorite, “salt pig.”
• #35: One thing about English: Sometimes precise definitions don't exist, and it's not worth forcing distinctions for their own sake.
• #37: Let's start low-tech: Dictionaries were great. Online dictionaries that allow you to search within definitions are even better. It can be super helpful just to look up something like “spatula” or “salt cellar.” But the dictionary is not the last word!
• #38: I love the Oxford English Dictionary, but when you want info on English as she is spoke, it's useful to look at more casual sources. Wiktionary, Wordnik, even Urban Dictionary. (Which gives you a whole different perspective on some culinary terms.)
• #39: For us: Cooking guides and cookbooks. Most of the how-to books like America's Test Kitchen's guides or Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything have discussions of kitchen equipment.
• #40: This is a super fun resource. Cooking has a strong regional component to it, so it's not all that surprising that there are regionalisms involved in cooking words. I used an online version through the Seattle Public Library's subscription, and once again used the definition search.
• #41: Related: Remember the amazing dialect test in the New York Times a couple of years ago? Based on the dialect survey.
• #42: Sure, it's fun to mock people for saying "pop," but you don't actually want to make things difficult for them.
• #43: You can use a spatula! Yet another kind of spatula! Note that some dictionaries and subject matter books will draw out a distinction between frosting and icing, but out there in the real world people aren’t as precise. (For the record, icing is usually thinner, like a glaze, while frosting is lighter and fluffier. If you’re talking to a hardcore baker.)
• #44: Those resources all gave suggestions for words and terminology that people in general use. Could we bring that around to be more specific, focusing on Sur La Table customers?
• #47: If you’re using Google Analytics, you can get data on what terms people are searching for on your site. This is probably true for other analytics software, but I can’t swear to it.
• #48: "Spatula" was one of the top 50 searched-for terms on the Sur La Table website. "Turner" was not. Neither was “flipper.” But they were both out there!
• #49: This means finding — or creating — places where they talk.
• #50: We used a company that served random web visitors a survey where you can rank a bunch of questions from 1 to 10. (I know, I hate them too.) I didn't love their quantification, but I was a big fan of the write-in fields. One of the many things you could find out: the words they used.
• #51: We were lucky enough to get a steady stream of customer reviews on many products, and it was always interesting to dive in and read them.
• #53: One thing that we got while I was working at Sur La Table: Online chat transcripts. Direct feedback: "This customer said they couldn't find X."
• #55: Remember the whole spatula vs. flipper vs. turner thing? Because we were re-taxonomizing the website, we got funding for actual live usability sessions. (Our first ever!) One task we asked people to perform was to think of something they'd shop for for their kitchen, then see if they could find it on our site without using search. One woman said she wanted to buy a new spatula. Because we were testing taxonomy, people weren't allowed to search.
• #56: At the time, we had a landing page for turners, and a landing page for spatulas, with completely different inventory. Turners had the pancake flippers, spatulas had the bowl scrapers and cupcake frosters. This woman found her way to the Spatulas landing page, but she was looking for something to use to turn over hamburgers. Something we, unbeknownst to her, called a Turner. She spent five minutes talking through how confused she was that we didn't carry many spatulas. (In a cruel irony, two turners had been included on the spatula page by accident, so there was just enough confirmation to really keep her fixated.)
• #57: It was a total “climax of Die Hard” moment. Sing "Ode to Joy." Come on, James, do it.
• #58: I had made this point, verbally, many times. People even generally agreed with it, though they didn't care much. But watching a customer — someone who knew and liked our brand — obsess for five minutes about why we didn't sell spatulas made things change.
• #61: We also made some changes to our search thesaurus.
• #62: See how the results compare.
• #63: Ideally, searching for "skillet," "frying pan," or "fry pan" should turn up the same results, even if, like us, you always call them skillets.
• #65: So are "bain-marie" and "double boiler," or "flapjack" and "pancake," or "immersion blender" and "stick blender" and "hand blender" and "wand blender.” Sur La Table doesn’t sell them, but a search for “Hamilton soundtrack” should turn up the Hamilton cast recording, even if calling it a soundtrack gives theater nerds hives. Note: We used Endeca to run site searches at the time. I won't go into details, because they're not the only internal search engine out there. I can't promise that it's easy, but if you can roll up your sleeves and tinker with the search thesaurus, it's worth it.
• #66: It's a little trickier when the search terms are not exact synonyms.
• #67: So when someone searches for the word "spatula," they'll see both bowl scrapers and pancake flippers. But when they search for the word "turner" (or "flipper"), they see pancake flippers but not bowl scrapers. Why? "Spatula" is a broader word, so we couldn't know which spatula people meant. But "turner" and "flipper" are both more specific — people using those terms knew they didn't want the bowl scraper. They had stuff to turn over. Figuring out the logic of synonyms is one of the fun parts of this detailed vocabulary work.
• #69: As in creating or maintaining one, not just consulting one.
• #71: This is another thing to keep an eye on in internal search data, by the way — how forgiving is the built-in correction? Test it out! And if it sucks, see if you can tweak it (or get a better search function).
• #72: A little secret: The Sur La Table cooking program has a recipe for pad thai, but they spell it "phad thai" (with the H) because that's how it was spelled on the menu at the restaurant where they got it. No references pointing out the overwhelming popularity of "pad thai" without the H dissuaded them. So we made sure that searches for "pad thai" would turn up those classes and recipes. Note that this kind of spelling behavior is something that Google does really well (surprise), and lots of internal search engines are pretty good at. But in this case, it didn't hurt to nudge it along.
• #75: Have you argued about whether to use "soda" or "pop"? "Comics" or "graphic novel" or "comic book"? "Drinking fountain" or "water fountain" or the correct term, "bubbler"?
• #76: Example: When I worked on a web redesign for Travel Oregon, I noticed that the design team had distinct definitions for major parts of their site navigation: "See and Do," "Trip Ideas," and "Attractions." When we asked actual Travel Oregon customers about these terms, though, many of them didn't see any difference between these terms. Maybe worse, the people who did think they were different didn't agree on what the definitions were. For example, some people thought of attractions as manmade, some as natural. In the end we simplified the site taxonomy and got rid of many overlapping concepts as navigation elements.
• #77: I did a google search. The phrase is available. I’m sure I didn’t invent the idea of doing this exercise.
• #78: And in which contexts!
• #81: A couple of months before I left Sur La Table, we had another round of full-on usability sessions. This time, one woman said she wanted to find a hand mixer.
• #82: This is what she found. But it wasn't what she was looking for.
• #83: This is what she was looking for. Everyone in the room was surprised — it never would've occurred to us to confuse the terms. But once we found out we were able to play with the search thesaurus. (Content marketers take note: We wrote blog posts about "What's the difference between a spatula, a turner, and a flipper?" and "What's the difference between a hand mixer and an immersion blender?" and they've both proved wildly popular, especially with natural search. People are curious.)
• #84: Paying attention to the language your customers use — and what they expect from you — helps prioritize the stuff you don't need to do. Here's what I mean.
• #86: Editing is a user experience discipline. Or a reader experience discipline, if you want some more precise jargon.
• #87: We all know how useful "best practices" are. Better than nothing, but no match for a good blaster at your side. Or actual user data and experience. But a lot of editing practices get handed down like old recipes, or the way "best practices" are passed around.
• #88: We all know how precious editorial time is. Why spend that time on things that don't matter to your audience?
• #89: For example.
• #90: Everyone know what widows and orphans are, from a typesetting perspective? Stray lines left dangling at the beginning or end of a paragraph. Copyeditors used to spend lots of time editing text to avoid them. Alex Cruden, a copyeditor for the Free Press in Detroit, tested copy featuring these and other bad breaks with readers — and the readers didn't notice.
• #92: Of course, we work on the web, where fretting over widows and orphans is, or should be, a thing of the past, given how copy can look different on every browser and device.
• #93: A similar story: The AP Stylebook decided, a couple of years ago, to change a rule they had about the use of "over". Previously, you could not conform to AP style and use "over" for numbers, and had to change it to "more than."
• #95: Where did this come from? Not from linguists, or even grammarians. It was a pet peeve of a 19th Century newspaper editor, who just decreed that "over" or "above" should be used with numbers, rather than "more than."
• #101: Most of us who write or edit for a living have an opinion about serial commas — it's a sign that you care! But I have yet to see any proof that customers or other users notice which way you go, unless you blindly follow a style guide. Pick your style, break it when necessary for clarity, and move on.