Yesterday I read a BBC story on the people who keep our internet running by repairing subsea cables. It’s a fun read if you’ve got the time; it’s easy to forget that everything around us, no matter how major or minor, is possible because of people behind the scene.
The article goes into detail about how these cables are broken: while I imagined sharks chomping down, deep-floor earthquakes, and sabotage missions, “most faults…relate to accidental human activities like the dropping of anchors or dragging of trawler boat nets.”
There are 1.4 million kilometers of cable under our waters, yet only about 150–200 issues a year. And even these are rarely felt by the general public, because most countries have redundancies built in.
Yet when things don’t work, we notice. Most of my city was impacted by an internet outage a few days ago; I think of that rather than the “up and running” status that it maintains 99% of the time. If I go to a coffeeshop and their usually-delicious latte is outright bad one afternoon, I’m less likely to go again. If my RyanAir flight is delayed, I’m more likely to book Wizz the next time around, even if the ten previous flights were okay.
Humans are unforgiving. We expect a certain level of perfection (something that’s true even without going into the effects of social media). Our brains put more emphasis on bad experience (see: Negativity bias). It’s just how we’re wired.
I bring this up often when advocating for consistent copy. Does it really matter if every subtitle has a period? Will anyone notice if some of the pages are in sentence case and others are in title case?
Well: yeah. Our brains are also wired to notice discrepancies. But I get it: If an experience works otherwise perfectly, maybe consistency isn’t a make-or-break thing.
But rrrors and inconsistencies on your platform — even if they’re “just” copy — can condition users to assume that this minor mess is just the visible part of an iceberg. You know when you go to a restaurant and their front room is a bit messy, and you ask yourself, god, what must the kitchen look like? Same principle.
It’s also just an easy win. No, keeping track of sentence structures and capitalization and punctuation isn’t the funnest part of my job, and it’s far from the most important. But it’s an extra polish that I can add to the user’s experience, and as we’ve already established: perceptions matter. Maybe that bruised, dull apple at the grocery store tastes great, but I’d rather grab the shiny one sitting next to it.
Let’s not give our users anything negative to latch on to. Even something as minor as a period.
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