Remove (Unnecessary) Words

Sometimes Less Content is as easy as fewer words. I was excited to find this list of 20 phrases you can replace with one word. (Thanks to Deborah Edwards-Onoro for sharing that link!)

Last summer, I was on a plane next to a man who was working on a lengthy proposal. He was working on one paragraph for most of the flight. He was stuck in overwording hell, and he couldn't get out of that mindset. (Not an uncommon problem when you have been working on something for a long time, I'm sure.) I gave him a few suggestions here and there, but after a while I just asked for his laptop. He was so frustrated that he happily handed it over. I copied & pasted his paragraph (to preserve the original) and then edited it down to about half of its original length, mostly by using suggestions like the one in the link above. My neighbor was thrilled with the end result, which was so much simpler and easy to understand on the first reading. 

Mostly, I was sad I couldn't do the same for the rest of his document. I hope he saw the value of simple wording and plain language and applied it to the rest of his editing efforts.

How about you? Any great stories about cutting copy for the better?

Fewer form fields!

LOVE this commercial for Visa's new V.me! You know, there are a lot of other ways to minimize the number of fields on your forms. (You never *have* to ask for credit card type, for example, no matter whether your customers have something like v.me or not.)

(See the others in the series here. They're awesome.)

Less Content... in apps

When decluttering your product, don't stop at your Web site! Apps benefit from decluttering, too!

Apps that focus to a smaller set of goals are genrally much better and have greater user acceptance.

Word.

And that's just a tiny nugget of the awesomeness in this article from Juhani Lehtimaeki.

http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/12/supporting-user-goals-makes-good-apps.html

Less Content... In Presentations

So says Idan Gazit, about 3/4 of the way down the page in his post on Designing Presentations.

Forcing yourself to ruthlessly trim your slide content is the best way to evaluate what really matters to your message. Can you cut the slide or merge it with another one? Is there a better combination of words to illustrate the point you’re making?

Less content also has another nice side effect: you can make your text large. Enormous is good—people in the back are often quite far from the projector screen. Make their lives easier and they’re more apt to give you their attention.

Don’t bother with clipart, animation, and other little visual embellishments. Better to have something clean, typographical, and timeless than a powerpoint cliché.