Once upon a time, we assumed our audiences were idiots. It was a happy time, and we spoon fed them little snippets of loveliness to help them do what we wanted.
A help page on a website here, a nice piece of copy there, maybe even a little paperclip suggesting that you seemed to be writing a letter.
Then something happened, and we started treating our audiences like crap. Behold our amazing validation processes! We don’t need to tell you what you need to to, we’ll just tell you when you’ve done something wrong you incompetent fool! How dare you not know that that little asterisk means I need your phone number, have yourself a big bold red asterisk as a warning. Why can’t you write like a decent Englishman, i’m going to underline your sentence with a meaningless green squiggly line.
But perhaps the tide is turning. Maybe it started around the time inline form validation became the new thing. We started to help our users again, let them know what we expected them to do and why. We weren’t waiting for them to make mistakes, we wanted to help them.
And what followed was good copy. No more ‘computer says no’, we actually started to think about how we communicated with users. Copy started to be on brand, friendly, communicative…. nice even. Have a nice day. Thanks ever so for your time. We really do appreciate your custom.
So why not let’s go the whole hog and bring back the paperclip. Or the friendly old search companion (why did he outlast all the others, did someone at Microsoft just forget about him?). The people need help, and why on earth wouldn’t we want to give it to them?
