You might have heard of the KISS principle which stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
The idea is, rather appropriately, quite simple – design things to be as simple as possible to avoid confusing people. This can be applied to anything – interface design, programming, and indeed your copy.
In an earlier post, The Less you Say, the More we Listen, I suggested keeping your copy short and sweet. That’s one way of keeping it simple, another is to use simple language that all your audience can understand. in fact, it’s even a WCAG Guideline.
Overly-complex language confuses users
Opposite is an example of first direct failing to do this. To log in to your online banking account it asks you to enter your ‘1st, 5th, and penultimate‘ characters.
Do they really expect that every single customer knows what ‘penultimate‘ means? Have they tested that? What’s wrong with just saying the ‘8th character‘, or the ‘last but one character‘?
On the plus side they have followed one guideline for writing for the web – they’ve used numerals for numbers which makes it easier to pick out the required characters at a glance.
But of course, that that’s much use if people don’t know what the other character they’re meant to be entering is…