Interface design, writing, and sincerity

The Orwell quote is dead-on. It also could be re-cast as “The great enemy of clear communication is failed sincerity.”

Two other quotes pertain:

“First, I would straighten out the language.” That was the reply from Confucius when asked how he’d restore order to the world.

“Zealotry consists in re-doubling your efforts when you have lost sight of your aim.” That’s from George Santayana.

The challenges for copywriter and designer are to maintain distance enough from the source (and the ostensible sincerity of the source) — and objectivity enough for the target audience — to render the message and the interface with due clarity.

That’s about as sincere as it gets.

Certainly, in the context of commercial design, the main enemy to good interfaces is insincerity. I have worked in such contexts all my life, and it’s basically a daily struggle against those who would seek to be insincere for the purposes of making more money from unsuspecting users of the system being designed.

Incidentally, Orwell expanded on the idea in a famous essay in 1946.

As someone who works in academia, I couldn’t agree more strongly with Orwell’s quote. Academics teach grammar, punctuation and spelling, but they rarely teach clarity. Students are often judged by the quantity of their writing, not the quality of their thinking. And the academics themselves are often responsible for the most obtuse, convoluted and unreadable literary atrocities. They seem to subscribe to a variation of the old cliche: “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with excessive syllables.”

And of course, the same principle applies to design. “If we animate everything they won’t notice that our content and products are crap!” Which actually seemed to work for the first few years of the internet, but most folks seem to have become a bit wiser… except, perhaps, for the academics!

Dead on, of course, but the irony is that Orwell uses big words to explain his point. Makes me think that Orwell wasn’t all that sincere about it after all…

~Graham

Definitely, his statement still holds today. But I think insincerity on the internet is not so successful in terms of making money. Today honesty and good content is what counts.

Ofcourse also in design, a few decades ago we couldn’t choose and now with competition we have (too) much to choose from, so sincerity definitely plays an important role as well.

I think in the case of interface design, there’s another factor: It’s incertitude. Make too much words because you never know if your customer gets the point.
I live the rule: “If you’re done with your text, discard 50% of the words.” (don’t know who’s the originator).

Ah, the irony of me having to look up the word “incertitude” in a discussion about clarity