I’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that.
Sonder
First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading that post helps to explain it. After I wrote that, I created a category on the blog focused on “sonder”. The idea was solid, but most people hadn’t read that most and therefore it wasn’t a clear name. I changed that category name to “empathy”, which is largely the same idea but is something that more people understand.
Experience
As part of the redesign of the GreenMellen website a few years ago, we included a tab at the top called “experience”. People could click on it to see work we’ve done in a variety of ways, and it was a great way to get to know us better. However, people didn’t know what to expect from “experience”, so it rarely got clicked. Instead of being the most popular tab in our navigation, as it likely should have been for someone that wanted to see our work, it was the least clicked. Here’s a heatmap of it, showing the relative lack of clicks:
We made a small change, rewording it from “experience” to simply “work”, with the clarity of “if you want to see our work, there it is”. The results have been fantastic, and that section now gets the appropriate amount of traffic.
As I shared recently, distinction can be good, but clarity is better.
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