Don’t Be Afraid Of Small Words

Diego Doval
Jul 21, 2017 · 10 min read

Powerful new ideas can’t be brought to life without them.

“Big” words are all the rage these days in product design and development. But it’s Small words that get things done.

What do I mean by “Big” words? I mean words that convey that, oh no, you’re not just building an app. You’re building a platform!

Or, An Experience.

Or, A New Way Of Seeing Things.

Or, A Universal System For Advanced Stuff.

Or, a relative newcomer to the scene: “X will give your Y superpowers.”

Be Who You Are

This applies to a product and a company as much as a person: Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. “Be Authentic” is a common refrain of modern-day social media marketing.

A tip: if you have to actively think and do work to “be authentic” you are doing it wrong.

It doesn’t mean ambitiousness is misplaced. ‘Punching above your weight’ is one thing. But it’s another to endow your product with magical abilities: talking about what an iPhone app does as if it was just the thing we needed to make everything perfect, or to have “the most beautiful [insert your app category here]”, or… well, you know what I mean.

So I am not suggesting we should stop using generic or overly broad “aspirational” terminology altogether, but a bit of caution wouldn’t be a bad thing.

For example, you can take something like TextEdit (macOS) or Notepad (Windows) or vi (Unix) and call it “A Creativity Platform For The Printed Word.” Or we could just say they’re text editors and we’d be better off, because that first description is instantly unmasked as pretentious, inauthentic, or even worse: condescending, and small, and mean.

Because if you really believe that some digital trinket or a new photo app is “revolutionary” then we’re not thinking much of revolutions, are we?

And Big Words applied to Small Things doesn’t just mean that either you’re duplicitous or you think I’m stupid. It is also a Big Bad Constraint that you’re setting upon yourself.

Because, if some new calendar app is “The Perfect Calendar”, that doesn’t leave much room for improvement does it?

“Oh, but of course we’ll work on version 2.0 and that will be the Perfect Calendar.”

Oh yeah? And what happens in your brain when you spend months or years talking and writing about 1.0 as the “perfect” calendar. Maybe you will ignore problems that need solving. Maybe the app sucks and you’re just defining “perfect” to be “whatever got through App Store Review first.”

You’ll end up lying every which way in no time.

Again: labeling at the extremes means that either you are overestimating what something does, or you’re underestimating what something else is.

Not Everything Is A ‘Platform’

The words we choose to express ourselves are not just a reflection of how we think. They carry with them constraints. In design, and software design in particular, the words we choose carry over all the way to implementation. How something works will frequently be different depending on what you call it early on. It’s one of the reasons behind my insistence on calling people people instead of users.

When we create an early-stage mockup of a site and we add a button that says “Edit Profile” instead of “Change Personal Information” or “Update Account Name/Password” we are making an choice that, while generally implicit, has profound impact in what will later be developed. A sketch, a product spec, a concept blurb, all of these things will see their attributes amplified by the development process.

This is definitely well understood by the marketing folks however, and they go way overboard with this, every time.

These days, for example, you should make sure you’re not building just an app, but a ‘platform.’

In the late 90s there was a similar idiotic fixation with the word ‘tool.’ You didn’t want to be building a tool. Never! Tools were bad. Tools were small, niche markets. Tools didn’t get funding.

You had to aim for ‘more’.

So no one built tools. But guess what. We needed those damn tools to build stuff. So open source software and small independent outfits filled the holes left by the geniuses that wouldn’t invest because of a word that was ‘niche.’

Truth is, even ‘tool’ is excessive. You can’t cut wood in two with any ‘tool’. You need an axe. You can’t paint with ‘a tool’. You need a brush, or a pencil.

I think very few people can define clearly what a “platform” is. Which is another reason why sometimes these words are chosen: because they mean anything… they mean nothing.

If design aims (or should aim) for clarity then precision in terminology is critical. Precision is also important when trying to go beyond what’s there. Vague, generic terms can be as damaging as using the wrong ones.

Loose Terms Become Unseen Shackles

It’s fascinating to me that many of the earliest words chosen to describe how we accessed data on the Internet were actually fairly accurate about what you could do… and how they have come to create an expectation and guide behavior to the point where we have a hard time

‘Surfing’ the web, the idea being that while you can control direction in a general sense, pretty much everything else is not in your hands. An ocean of data, and what we could touch and use were a few waves.

‘Browsing’ — still used to this day, a pretty generic but also accurate verb in terms of the speed and precision with which you can find information, and, much like ‘browsing’ in a library, your knowledge and mastery of the library’s indexing systems (search engines) is a huge factor in the amount of information you can extract from it.

And don’t get me started on ‘search’ as a verb. Because what we really should be focusing on is on the ability to find things, not searching for them… right? As I’ve said elsewhere, the best search is the one you never have to do.

Terms, once aspirational and descriptive, becomes shackles.

Terminology matters. What we choose to call things matters.

Big Words Are Confusing

Episode of Season 4 of The West Wing (‘Inauguration Part II: Over There’) includes a great exchange between Toby and Will as they prepare the speech, the second inaugural. Will is arguing against vague language he’s been forced to add to the foreign policy.

WILL
"...To do what we can to fulfill humanity's promise and to prove that self-determination is the watchword of all mankind."
TOBY
The watchword of all mankind? I don't know what that means.
WILL
Don't worry, neither will anyone else.

Overarching, generic terminology can come back to bite us.

What is the difference between the Web and the Internet?

Is HTML a protocol or a format? What does “Layer 7” mean? What are RFCs?

For the vast majority of people, even many people in technology, the answer to all those questions will be “I don’t know.”

And that’s the way it should be. Most of us drive cars, but very few of us could pick apart an engine, much less build one from scratch.

But everyone who owns a car knows the difference between the car and the engine: engines come in different forms, they can be used for vehicles and machines other than cars, and so forth.

Most people, when told “the car is not the engine” would probably say “obviously,” while very few if any would be surprised by the statement.

But when dealing with information technologies, the situation is reversed.

XKCD: Before The Internet

The Browser is not the Web. An App is not the Internet. Word isn’t Windows. Google is not your connection. Many people would be surprised, if not confused, by some or even all of these statements. Only a minority would think “obviously.”

If you are in that minority, you may be surprised that this is the case, but it is.

Cars and engines are physical; the fact that they are two different things — albeit tightly interconnected, even interdependent to different degrees — is almost axiomatic. We have used, seen, or heard of, or studied instances in which engines exist without cars, which is why the concepts are easy to perceive as separate. They are physical constructs, they can be touched, while the fact that they typically break down in nearly binary terms (ie., the car either starts or doesn’t, the fridge either works or doesn’t) is also useful.

On the other hand, information technologies seem to blend into each other, are intertwined in ways invisible to the layperson. The multitude of layers, software, services, providers, is a key element in the Internet’s strength, but it also makes it more opaque for people who use it. The massive efforts of engineers over the last few decades have resulted in a multitude of recovery and error states in which it’s hard to tell what, exactly, is wrong. When a short video is “buffering” for ten minutes, is it because the Internet is slow? Is it because of a router rebooting somewhere? The cable modem? The PC? The browser? The browser’s plugin? Or any of the ten other possible problems we haven’t thought of? And that’s even when you have a reasonable understanding on the myriad of components involved along the path for delivering one particular service.

Until a few years ago, most people didn’t experience “the Internet” through anything other than a Web browser and their email app. Even now, as everything from your scale to your security system to your gaming console starts to connect to (and often, depend on) the Internet, the exact nature of what’s going on remains elusive. “Reboot the router” has become the new “Reboot the PC.”

To add to the confusion, hardware itself has become more integrated, more difficult to separate into discrete components.

The browser becomes the operating system, the operating system becomes the display, The display becomes the computer. The computer becomes the Internet.

The Web, Browsers, Email, Operating Systems, not only they all seem linked to varying degrees that are hard to pull apart; they have also evolved in an apparently seamless progression that has had the unintended effect of blurring the lines between them. You can see web pages in your email, you can check your email inside a browser, and so on.

It’s as if combustion engines existed only as part of, say, four door cars. After decades of only seeing engines in four-door cars, it would be natural to mix them up. Only mechanics would be left to argue that an engine could be used to power other vehicles, or other machinery.

By being vague and generic we are just making things harder for ourselves.

We Can Do Better

This matters because over time it seems hard to imagine that parts of the whole can be repurposed or used for anything but what we use them for.

With software, it’s far too easy to conflate form and function. And when the software in question involves simple (but not simplistic), fundamental abstractions, it’s easy for those abstractions to swallow everything else.

The Web browser paradigm, for example, has been so spectacularly successful that it seems nothing could exist in its place, particularly when Web browsers, designed primarily to support HTTP and HTML, subsumed Gopher or FTP early on, and entire runtime environments and applications later.

At the dawn of the Web, browsers implemented various protocols, and someone that accessed, for example, an FTP site understood that the browser was (in a sense) “pretending” to be an FTP client. Today, if the average user happens to stumble, via hyperlinks, onto an FTP server, they will be unlikely to recognize the fact that they’re not looking at a website. They probably won’t notice that the URL starts with “ftp://” (most modern browsers hide the protocol portion of URLs, some hide URLs altogether) and if they do, they probably won’t know what it means. They may even think that the site in question is poorly designed.

Over time, it has become harder to conceive of anything that doesn’t rely on this paradigm and we try to fit all new concepts into it. One implementation of the idea of hypertext has achieved in a sense a form of inevitability. It seems inescapable that this is what hypertext should be.

But of course it isn’t.

The Web, Email, Calendars, Address Books, Filesystems: they are all in a sense elemental. Their primal nature and scale of deployment makes it easy to mix up their current incarnation with their essential form and function. We should be constantly thinking of new ways to talk about them.

When thinking of the information we use in various tasks and contexts, it’s nearly impossible to avoid putting information not just in categories but in whatever is the most common way in which we use them. Computing has exposed the true nature of data as an ethereal, infinitely malleable construct, but we think in analogies and physical terms. A document becomes a web page, or a file. A message becomes an email, or a ‘text’. An appointment becomes a calendar entry. The phrase “following a hyperlink” will create in a lot of people the mental image of clicking or tapping on blue underlined text within a Web page, in a Web browser, even if the concept of a hyperlink is not tied uniquely to HTML, or the World Wide Web, underlined text, or, perhaps most obviously, the color blue.

Avoiding these categories is, admittedly, difficult. The software that, in our collective psyche, has come to be associated so strongly to those categories has remained nearly unchanged in its basic behavior and function since it was first developed, decades ago, which makes it seem even more like unchangeable features of our information landscape, rather than the very first step in a long evolutionary process.

If we are ever going to advance beyond the initial paradigms and metaphors of data rooted in the physical world, we need to reclaim some of these terms, but as importantly, we need to create new ones that are specific and descriptive.

The future we are building will be imagined using lots of Big words, but it will also need Small words to become real.

)

Diego Doval

Written by

Avid reader, occasional writer. Drexel CS Alum, Trinity College Dublin PhD CS. Previously CTO & CPO at Ning, Inc. Now building n3xt! (http://bit.ly/whatsn3xt)

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade