On the Floor

Last year, against my better judgement, I joined a ball hockey team.  I've always liked hockey, but as a small kid who couldn't skate well and hated mornings, playing it just seemed to be one of those things that wasn't for me.  Still, when my friend told me he was starting a team that played on Sunday afternoons and didn't require any skating I figured "why not" and signed up.

I was nervous before my first game.  I'm still not a big guy, I hadn't done any meaningful cardiovascular exercise since grade 9 gym class, and despite being pretty much unstoppable at EA Sports NHL video games since 1993, I more or less had no idea how to actually play hockey.  Before the game I was told to play defense.  When I jumped on the floor for my first shift, heart pounding from nerves, I promptly let a few goals in, got in the way, and was generally terrible. 

"Play defense" may have been a meaningful instruction from a teammate who had been playing hockey since childhood, but for me it represented a general concept and not much else.  I had the idea that I was supposed to help keep the ball out of the net, but I didn't really know how.

As web developers, it's important to remember that terms that are loaded with subtext for us don't always mean as much for our some of our users.  It's easy to think of less experienced users as stupid or ignorant, but when I'm working on an application that requires user input, I find the better path is to think back on times when I was out of my wheelhouse and needed a little more information before I knew what to do. 

If my teammates had told me to always stay between the opposing player and our net, lift their sticks to prevent them from receiving a pass, and shove them out of the way when they're parked in front of the net I would have been far more effective and confident from the start.  Because they're not very complex instructions, it was just assumed that I knew what I was doing.  I did not.  In the same way, if we take the time to add a little bit of explanatory text to our sites our users will have more confidence when they use them.

For example, let's consider a signup form.  At its most basic, a signup form tends to have four fields:

Username:
Email:
Password:
Password Confirmation:

Simple, right?  If you're reading this blog post, there's probably nothing remotely challenging about this to you.  But imagine for a minute that you haven't signed up for hundreds of sites over the last 15 years and you're just getting starting to get comfortable with surfing.  You aren't going to get the implied expectations of those form fields.  Let's fix it up to be a little more helpful:

Desired User Name: (Choose a name or nickname to represent you on this site.)
Email: (Enter your email address.  It won't be shared with anyone.)
Choose Password: (Enter a password to use when you log in.)
Confirm Your Password: (Type the same password again.)

With a little bit of explanation we're able to make our sign up form much more approachable.  In turn, we'll probably see increased signups as we have fewer people being turned away by their fear of doing something "wrong." 

When you're putting together a web application, don't think about you the web developer.  Think about you on your first day of Karate class, you the first time you tried to cook a proper meal, you the first time you home-brewed beer, you the first time you did anything that was outside your natural skill set.  You weren't stupid or ignorant, you just didn't have the experience to expand simple words or concepts into their full meaning.  Still, with a bit of helpful instruction from someone who knew that they were doing, you probably eventually found success.  I'm still no Sidney Crosby at ball hockey, and at this point I'd be happy just to be as good as the girls on the Slovakian women's Olympic team.  Still, armed with the knowledge of what I'm supposed to be doing, I can jump into the game with confidence instead of shying away from the experience.

Help your users, and yourself, by taking the extra five seconds to say what you really mean.