A headline in the Sunday paper reads, “Americans Are Loosing [sic] Employment at Record Rates.”
A Wednesday visit to the dentist yields a pamphlet on cavity prevention; its opening sentence concludes with a preposition.
Come Saturday, a restaurant’s menu items flaunt their pedigree—Baby Manchego-Chive Cakes, Ancient Grain Cremini Risotto—but intrigue is negated by the header under which they fall: New Special’s [sic].
A familiar buzzing besets my brain. An intangible itch coats my throat. It’s happening yet again—“it” in all its careless iterations—and my ethos bristles. The world ignores The Rules. They’re tiny details, people say.
Some would dub me The Grammar Police, but I don’t crave gotcha! moments—I relish teachable ones.
As a former nanny, I found myself defenseless against toddler pleas to empty the entire box of alphabet grahams: doesn’t early interest in spelling warrant commensurate privileges? As a writing tutor, I see fireworks when a student identifies and remedies a comma splice. And as a Literacy Teacher in an adult vocational program, the best days are those when students notice errors without prompting, or even better, gain incremental willingness to revise their drafts.
Long before I’d heard of microcopy or of UX Writing, I daydreamed jobs that would satiate my drive for detail and love of lexicology:
Whatever the role, it’d be undercover. Bylines don’t entice me much; the beauty’s in the work. The work has long been fueled by zeal for word choice, syntax and their kin, and more recently by revelations gained in the certificate program at UX Writing Academy. Learning the language for user experience has felt like coming home to my own sensibilities. Now, more than ever, businesses are either heroes or villains—working to heal the eye-brain interplay or to shuttle it toward destruction.
Before UX Writing, I’d instinctively eschewed stores named, for example, 78th St. Candy Cigarette Drinks Deli. Now I can better articulate what offends me about them. It’s not just the We <3 Our Costumers sign, the failure to consider any hint of branding, or the one-eyed cat who’s de facto exterminator. It’s the cognitive overload of the verbose, patchwork menu clumsily taped to the wall; the way the checkout line bottlenecks due to ill-placed endcaps; the fact that your receipt, if you get one, doesn’t itemize anything. In short: it’s bad UX. And now that I have words for that, I see it everywhere.
The app’s Sign Out button is nowhere to be found, prompting a search through endless tabs till it’s found buried at the bottom of the Settings menu.
The salon lists prices in gray print against a peach ombré background, legible only for those with valedictorian status at their ophthalmologist’s office.
The ubiquitous e-commerce site has easily squashed both competitors and brick-and-mortars. Still, its IA reads like a disorganized novel.
“Big deal,” some say. They mistake an observational bent for being tightly wound, and suggest I live a little. Others say the personal is political. Those people are my people. They get that it’s not merely inconvenient that my bank’s app is unresponsive to the iPhone’s font size adjuster; it’s evidence of lazy work. Citibank may not care, but I find it matters whether I’m transferring $500.00 vs. $5000.00. I fantasize of one day breaching corporate headquarters to deliver a monologue on accessibility and, in grand dramatic fashion that matters to positively no one, closing my account of 15 years.
Today I begin researching new banks…and while I’m online, I check the results of a recent COVID test at my local urgent care. StatCare’s app includes no helper text to distinguish Username from ID. Figuring that one of these must be my email address, I try entering it in each field before succumbing to Recover My Login—which sounds like some entity entirely distinct from both Username and ID. Granted entry, I toggle between the Tests tab and Results tab. (Would Results not be, well, Results of Tests performed? And if so, why not eliminate the Tests tab altogether and pare down this madness?)
It turns out I do not have COVID.
Still, my brain is tired. I hit a nearby Starbucks for a tall chai tea, annoyed that grande and venti are Italian whereas tall breaks ranks and renders this a half-brewed theme. Is it deliberate—meant to deny purchasers of talls the fleeting satisfaction of a civilized Italian identity? (Never mind that tall connotes a certain towering in spite of being shortest in Starbucks stature. Who falls for this stuff?) The barista interrupts these musings with earlobe spacers the size of saucers and a cup earmarked for someone sort of like me: Naden.
I wish, sometimes, that I did not pick up on detail.
I’m told I always have, though: the radar for nuance is roasted into me like pumpkin spice into coffee beans. My mother, chief archivist of the arc of me, still bemoans my toddlerhood insistence that we head home for an outfit change should mine incur a grass stain or a drip of ice cream. Detail also drove me to interrogate my little sister if my meticulously staged dollhouse furniture were found disturbed, and to claw my way to early vegetarianism upon spotting the veiny striations speckling chicken.
Perhaps the drive to keep my set of 96 Crayolas sharpened and in factory-issued sequence was a bid to organize a disorganized world. Perhaps I just liked coloring or rainbows. All this notwithstanding, I prefer to chalk the practice up to an affinity for good UX before its time.