Hello!
On my most recent projects I've been lucky enough to work on quite large things which have diverse audiences and stakeholders everywhere. One thing that's become apparent in my work though is the importance of discourse and context.
I know, I know, hold your excitement. My studies in politics and the role of culture within politics trained me to have an open and analytical mind always questioning provenance of people's view points. Why does someone think the way they do? What do they mean when they say something? Of course the answer many people give to those questions is that someone surely means what they say. Issue being, what if those words carry different weight, context and meaning?
When learning languages in schools we're warned about 'false friends' - words which look similar to words of our own language which when we may mistakenly believe to have similar if not the same meaning. We look for meaning in words and attempt to apply that to our own circumstances. We must be incredibly careful to make sure our words are right, and then once we know an objective word we must understand the context ladelled on to it.
Let's use 'cat' as an example. What a cat is has changed over time, not objectively of course, the same small (often) furry, carnivorous feline, but subjectively cats have changed constantly. Looking at Ancient Egypt, they viewed cats as gods, purely divine beings worthy of praise and wonder.
Fast forward a few thousand years and the cat has lost its privileged place and is now a moggy, a scoundrel and pest about town spreading fleas, disease and continual overbreeding. The god had fallen.
Fast forward to present day, now cats revel in their status as internet meme-kings. Expressive reactions to situations and beloved sources of fun as well as being beloved family pets. Cats are cool... unless the human to cat ratio is way off... currently we only have three cats. It is staying that way.
My point is, whilst the animal stays the same the feelings it invokes vary incredibly wildly depending on the audience. Local dialects are important to understand, growing up in the north east I had no idea that pease pudding was a local dish you couldn't get in other areas, the word 'mint' meaning good was local to our region or that nobody had ever really heard of 'geet' as a supplement to 'great' when referring to size. I'm certain you will have experiences in your life where you unknowingly introduce words or concepts to only get faces staring blankly at you.
So how does this relate to product development and user research? Well it's quite simple really. We must understand the goals and aims of our stakeholders, users and team members.
We must conduct thorough research to understand the intent of our users, what they actually want to accomplish and how they express it. We must come to them on their terms and use discourse they understand and appreciate, speak directly with your audience in a language they will understand, even if it's not your chosen one.
We must have a shared understanding of words and aims within our teams. When something is 'broken', how broken is it? Has it fallen over and stopped working for a while, is it shattered like a fancy glass fruit bowl or are we talking nuclear meltdown with the team needing to run toward their CVs?
Getting everyone on to the same page can be difficult, all team members must have an understanding of the stakeholder and end user and hopefully conduct research with them. Upskilling and bringing new additions to teams can take a little while, but it's truly worth it to ensure that the user is put first and it saves time in the end as they themselves can understand the user and speak to them on their terms.
We can utilise framing and discourse to serve relevant audiences. A case in point is how I pulled off the greatest upsell of all time at Build-a-Bear. One festive period the store offered a special Christmas bear for £5 when a guest spent £25. The deal was well publicised and promoted in newsletters and in store. Unfortunately for our store a significant amount of our deal bears were faulty with the legs sewn on backwards. This didn’t suit many guests with the bulk of them looking like they’d be sent back.
One family was shopping for their youngest son who had twisted his ankle and unfortunately been in hospital, the bear they were getting was to cheer him up. The family qualified for the deal and when we offered the bear with the fault the older sister couldn’t stop laughing, she said that the bear was just like her brother. From building a rapport with the family in their journey throughout the store we managed to upsell not just the bear, but a whole host of accessories, including a sling, wheelchair, dressing gown and slippers. Framing the bear as an opportunity to share a family experience as opposed to a faulty upsell paid off in dividends. It also ensured that I’d be kept on after the Christmas period.
Framing discourse pays off.
The teams I've worked with have often found this incredibly useful as it helps not only the end user, the team itself but also it makes our job easier in explaining our work to external stakeholders which in itself helps promote the value of the work we do.
Hopefully I've explained just a sliver of why words matter. We should strive to speak in plain english, as simply as possible, but that's not to say we can't use beautiful words, we just need the audience to know what we mean.