Talking to Stephen Walling I suggested we should run a half day / day discussing our approach to copy text.
It would be great to get an expert in and open this to the wider volunteer community as well. I'm sure there is a lot we can learn from such a session and find some concrete ways of improving copy throughout our products. We ran a similar session with Cooper [1] for our approach to UX and this could be done in a similar way.
Would anyone be up for this? Does anyone know someone who could lead such a session? Is anyone up for organising this?
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoTmNU_5A0
On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/11/2012 04:35 PM, Munaf Assaf wrote:
- Let's not overdo it (e.g. a search button shouldn't say "/Search the
largest knowledge base on the planet/").
It is more radical than this: use always the shortest strings possible. English tends to be pretty efficient in computer UIs but many other languages will struggle with longer words, more articles, prepositions, etc.
Two obvious real examples I found yesterday by using Mobile Beta in Catalan:
"Mobile settings" is better than "Mobile site settings" http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/About_MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend...
"Save" is better than "Save settings" http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/About_MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend...
-- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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