101 UX Principles

Chapter #90. Choose Active Verbs over Passive

Most of this book is concerned with using visual design to improve the user's experience. However, the words that we use as designers also have a huge impact on the usability of the products we create.

10 years ago, I found myself on a half-day course by the Plain English Campaign (the body behind the "Crystal Mark" for documents that are easy to read and understand). There were a lot of great tips on the course, but the section on the active and passive voice really stuck with me:

"A verb is in the passive voice when the subject of the sentence is acted on by the verb. For example, in 'the ball was thrown by the pitcher', the ball (the subject) receives the action of the verb, and 'was thrown' is in ...