I asked our UI team to do something today that I'll probably take some flack for. New users find blogging to be mostly incomprehensible. Not blogging itself per se, but specifically, the terminology that we've all adopted.
RSS, XML, RDF, Trackbacks, Permalinks (and its complement, the wonderfully concise but completely equivocal "#"), Auto-discovery and even the word "Blog" itself are all completely meaningless to the average person.
This is bad.
An ambiguous user interface can force customer support costs through the roof. Even worse, tools that don't make sense to users don't get used by users (at least not for long). I shouldn't be explainingwhat "Trackbacks" and "RSS" mean to every single new customer we get. But currently, I have to.
So I asked the design team to turf all references to these technical sillicisms from the Blogware UI.
I've almost done this two or three times in the past. Each time I was told that "Users will catch on", that "..they just need time to adjust to the new paradigm." or that "someone else invented these concepts, its only polite to call them by their proper name."
Bollocks.
They aren't catching on, they aren't adjusting (ignoring the fact that this really isn't a new paradigm) and I can't afford to continue to put politeness ahead of the needs of my customers. They deserve a fighting change to figure this stuff out for themselves. Forcing them to pick up the phone doesn't meet my definition of "user-friendly".
The technical functions won't disappear or change, but the UI will. "RSS" and "RDF" will cease to exist in Blogware-land - they will be replaced with the term "Syndication Format". Trackbacks will likely become "Incoming References". The term "Permalinks" and the hash sign are perma-banished from our vocabulary and will be perma-replaced by two perfectly understandable words "Permanent Link". There will probably be more changes as I continue to run through the UI.
Hopefully this makes the entire experience a little bit easier to understand for people that are new to blogging. Moreso, I hope it gives them another reason to stick around.
Small steps...