“Happy Talk Must Die”
October 9th, 2009 | Blog
The following excerpt is from an excellent book titled Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. (Thanks Elizabeth!) The subtitle of the book is A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.
We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to illustrate what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.”
If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, ‘Blah blah blah blah blah…’”
A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.”
This is a great principle to use whether you are writing for a website or a brochure.
