Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Don’t Use Words That Appear in the User Interface

It’s important not to use your application’s terminology when you create tasks and when you talk to your tester. You want to know whether people are capable of using your application. You don’t want to know whether they are able to find a specific word in your user interface.

Let’s say you’re testing a word processor, and you want to see whether people can use its spell-checker. The wireframe shows how this feature might be accessed in one of your application’s menus.

Now, if you were to phrase the task along the lines of “Check your document’s spelling,” your tester could simply look through ...