- At our recent Virtual UX Conference,
Jakob Nielsen gave a mini keynote
about vocabulary inflation in our field.
Let's have a listen.
- So, I really love to give these keynotes
at our traditional, physical conferences,
and we get everybody together in a big room,
and there's a stage and lights, and we give people a drink,
and we unfortunately cannot do that here
at the virtual conference.
But, that said, we can do other things,
and this is what I'd like to call "better than reality."
It should really be a design goal
for us when we do any kind of online,
electronic, or digital creation.
Try to not just replicate the physical world,
but rather, be better.
And so, one thing we can do that's better
is that we can have a tech check
before the conference starts.
For a physical conference,
it just makes no sense to ask people
to fly in the day before just to check their equipment.
And sure enough, every morning when we start,
the first day there are some people
who can't get the slides on their computer,
and that creates trouble, right?
And now, we can fix it before we start.
And the same is true for something
like a mini keynote that I am doing now.
It doesn't make sense in the physical conference
to set up the huge room with staging
and grab everybody together,
and then, it's just a little quick thing,
and then, back out again.
So, let's do something different
that we can do because it's virtual,
rather than lament that it's not physical,
so that's what we're doing.
And you know, I have been
in user experience field now for 38 years,
and during that time,
I have certainly seen many things change and evolve.
And one thing that has changed
and evolved that I am less happy with,
compared to many other things, is this vocabulary inflation.
So I'll show you that in my time in this field,
we've had, I would say, about 10 different terms
for just the basic field itself.
That's less than four years per name for our field,
and that's just ridiculous.
And that's what I call vocabulary inflation,
constantly changing what we call things,
always being dissatisfied with the old name,
always trying for something more fancy
rather than something plain spoken,
and people already know what it means.
And so, I think that's a disgrace,
and other fields don't do that.
I mean, think, for example, about psychology.
They've had the same name since 1748,
even though their methodology has surely changed a lot,
but you don't hear people today say,
"Well, psychology, that's what those guys did
"in the old days with introspection.
"Nowadays, we use scientific method.
"So now, we don't call it psychology anymore,
"that's what they did.
"We do mind science."
They don't say that, they still say they do psychology.
Or even more so, the field of history.
That field has the same name since the year 430 BC
when Herodotus wrote his book, "The Histories,"
or, really, in Greek, (speaking Greek),
and that is a word that means knowing by inquiry,
because his method was he would go around Greece
and find the oldest people he could find,
and then, he would ask them what stories they'd heard
from their grandparents.
And so, basically, he would go four generations back
and find out what had happened
in the old days with this method,
and that's what he wrote in his book, "The Histories."
But you don't see people today
in the field of history saying,
"Well, history, that's what Herodotus did,
"going around, talking to old people.
"That's not what we do today,
"we have more fancy ways of finding out
"what happened in the past, so we do past science,"
or some other weird name.
They just still use the same name,
even though they do it in a better way than Herodotus did.
Another example of this, and now, back to user experience,
let's take the methodology that's a tweak
on the standard usability study methodology
where you record the session,
and then, after the tasks,
you ask the user to review that recording
and comment on what happened.
And so, that's sometimes called retrospective testing,
which is the word I prefer.
But it's also called cooperative testing,
it's also called replay testing,
it's also called PEEP
or post-experience eye-tracked protocol,
if you do it with an eye-tracking study.
Actually my own father used this method back
in the 1950s in his research.
And he actually called it self-confrontation.
Now, that word didn't really catch on,
maybe too confrontational, I guess.
But, anyway, the same method keeps being reinvented
ever since the 1950s when my dad did it,
and carrying a new name every time.
And so, that's just a ridiculous example
of vocabulary inflation all over this field.
These names causes a lot of problems.
And I think the worst problem
is that we just get a lot of confusion,
and people are talking at cross purposes
when they use different words,
and they don't know that they are meaning the same thing.
And so, I think that's really the base issue
with vocabulary inflation.
It also means that our job titles get messed up.
Two different people may be doing the same thing
and have widely different job titles,
or the same title may mean different things.
And because of this change,
if you look at somebody's resume
who has been in the field for, let's say, 10 years,
their old job titles make no sense anymore.
You don't know what they mean
compared to current job titles.
And that can cause career problems,
and again, just more confusion and annoyance.
Actually, maybe the worst problem
is that vocabulary inflation
reduces cultural transmission.
And by cultural transmission,
I mean the way that you learn
from what has been done before.
The culture is transmitted into the next set
of people who are doing it.
And there's actually a very nice book about that
that I can recommend.
It's called, "The Secret of Our Success,"
and "our" now means humans.
So, "The Secret of Our Success,"
and that secret is that we learn
from what has been done before.
So we don't have to always personally invent everything,
because, of course, nobody is so smart
that they can invent everything that they need
to know or need to do.
And so, we take what's already known,
and then, we build or improve on that.
And that's how we constantly get better.
So you don't want to reinvent the wheel,
you want to take the wheel and make a better wheel.
Or, in user experience,
you don't want to reinvent the methods all the time,
or the insights, or the guidelines,
but you wanna take what's known and improve on it.
But that is harder to do when you don't rely
on what's been done before,
and you don't understand what's been done before,
because the vocabulary has changed every few years.
And finally, vocabulary inflation is just annoying.
It's extra work to just translate
what's already old knowledge into the same knowledge,
but written in a different way,
just extra overhead, annoyance, confusion.
So, why do we have it,
given that it has all these downsides?
Well, the first reason, I think, is just plain ignorance.
So, user experience is blessed in many ways
by being a growth field.
It's really going up all the time.
And a lot of new people are joining the field,
often from other fields.
Now, that's generally good,
but it means that they don't know the vocabulary
of our field, of the user experience field.
And so, maybe they legitimately think
that they thought up a new idea
when it's something that we've done for 50 years already.
And then, they come up with their own new name
for the existing, well-known thing.
Another reason is that user experience is,
sad to say, a kind of oppressed field,
unfortunately, in many companies.
It still not has that same recognition
or respect from other disciplines
or from the stakeholders or executives
as disciplines that have been around for longer,
because they have been around for longer
and are better understood.
And so, some people think that the way
to get respect is to repudiate what's gone before and say,
"Well, we don't do this usability.
"That's what they did in the dot-com bubble.
"Now, we do this other thing."
Make up more fancy terminology,
because people surely respect you
if you speak in a very advanced and strange way.
And actually, no, they will not.
People will not respect you
if they actually have a harder time understanding you,
because you use new vocabulary.
You get respect from delivering results,
not from speaking in more fancy, newly invented words.
And so, that's a problem right there.
And also, I think there's a deeper problem as well,
because if we don't honor our own heritage,
and we continuously say,
"No, what we used to do is not the right thing,"
why would anybody else respect us,
if we don't respect ourselves?
Rather, we should say we keep getting better,
and we will have these known things,
and we will adapt them to the circumstances as we go,
which is fine.
The last reason for vocabulary inflation
is more, almost, predatory.
It's like some companies like
to have their own branded terms
that bamboozle the clients, to be quite honest,
that they make up a term
for something that's quite well-known, but they say,
"Oh, this is our proprietary methodology,
"and if you come to us, things will be great."
I would much rather that they would compete
not on calling the same thing something else,
but rather, saying, "We do the same thing,
"but we do it with deeper insights,
"and more thorough methodology,"
or whatever it is that would be their competitive advantage,
depending on who they are.
That would be, to my opinion,
the way to really compete and differentiate yourself,
not by making up your proprietary methodology
that's really the same with a 5% tweak.
It's much better to understand if you say,
"We're doing this now,"
established thing that's been known to work for decades,
"And then, we're changing in these ways
"to work better for the types of projects we do."
That would be, first of all, more honest,
and it would be also easier to understand,
and it would reduce this amount of confusion
that the entire field is suffering from.
Now, what is the solution to vocabulary inflation?
I think, actually, it cannot be 100% solved,
because there are these strong forces pressing for it.
But I think the analogy is with monetary inflation.
That's how I came up with this term.
And in monetary inflation,
if you have high inflation
of 100% per year or 1,000% per year,
that will destroy the economy.
And there's some countries that
are examples of that in history.
But if you have inflation of 1% per year,
that doesn't matter at all.
Everybody can cope with that quite easily.
So I think, in the same way for vocabulary inflation,
a little bit of adaptation over decades
of the vocabulary is not gonna bother us.
It's like this constant change that is bothering us.
So let's just reduce it.
And so, I think there are a few ways we can reduce it.
And the first and maybe most important one is education.
So, get rid of this problem about people don't know
what things are called,
so they come up with their own word, not knowing any better.
And that's something that we are very,
very strong on in Nielsen Norman Group.
We also try to explain things in really plain-spoken,
clear language, not to mystify user experience,
but to clarify or simplify user experience.
So that, I think, is a really big,
it's our all's responsibility to do that.
Educate, educate, and make people understand
our existing vocabulary and our existing methodologies.
A second one is also everybody's responsibility,
which is resist!
Just refuse, when somebody comes up
with a fancy new term for a known thing
that already has a term, say,
"No, you're describing this that we already know!
"And maybe you're describing this with a 5% tweak,
"but then, that's what we should call it."
So if we do that,
I think we can actually reduce
vocabulary inflation quite a lot,
and that's what I would really encourage you guys to do.
So let's not reinvent the wheel every few years.
Let's not reinvent user experience.
Rather, let's make better user experience.
So that's my challenge to you, thank you.
- After Jakob's talk,
we asked the audience which term they preferred.
We got 458 responses, and the results?
In third place, product design with 7.6% of the votes.
In second place, user-centered design with 15.7%.
And in first place, the most preferred term,
with 64.2% of the votes, was user experience.