For digital designers who want to organise their working files to improve clarity and collaboration within and across teams

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.

Although successful websites typically have high usability, average sites can hurt their business by copying design elements that don't work well in other contexts.

While it is important to keep key information easily accessible, the 3-click rule is an arbitrary rule of thumb that is not backed by data.

Probably my biggest frustrations ... is the utter contempt they seem to hold content in. ... they won’t hire a professional copywriter to work on the content ... never teach content creators how to create appropriate web content.

Don’t start with the blah blah blah

Social science: Instead of calling it science though, we should call it what it is: pattern recognition. That's a far better description of what sociologists, historians, geographers, economists and anthropologists actually do.

Summary: For mobile navigation, image grids should be saved for deeper IA levels where visual differentiation between menu items is critical, as they increase page load times, create longer pages, and cause more scrolling.

We must design things on the basis that we want them to last, ... Because when you expect nothing to last, nothing does.

Imperative voice gets shared. Imperative voice boosts email click, open and read rates.

A clear visual hierarchy guides the eye to the most important elements on the page. It can be created through variations in color and contrast, scale, and grouping.

Forget Empowerment. Encourage Autonomy Instead. ... People also need authority.

"WHY did I want to quit? ... — ‘is it disinterest or discomfort?’"

Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.

The biggest challenge for distributed teams lies in communication and collaboration.

"Users rarely read an entire webpage. That means you need to adopt a different style when writing for the web. A style that accommodates this lack of attention."

Want a handy list of the core Clean Language questions? Here goes:

Whether we’re looking at The Correspondent, the world atlas or the national news, migration across the Mediterranean is depicted on maps as thick red arrows heading towards us. Far more than we realise, these arrows define how we view migration. Can that be changed?

ood UI design is all about guiding attention to what’s important. When making the right thing for the user the easy and obvious thing, you can’t ignore cognitive biases. After all, these biases are brain shortcuts that let us quickly and effortlessly make decisions and react to our environment.

The illusion of cheap storage has encouraged by far the worst hoarding habits in human history.

"understand the digital reader’s brain, and to get a couple of concrete writing tips for your next digital text." "Nothing can surpass a text when it comes to transforming abstract thoughts into concrete expression."

The “known-new contract” is a linguistic concept used to describe how writers achieve cohesion between sentences by first presenting what readers already know (information previously presented) before introducing new information.

Refrain from opening new browser windows. [...] Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab."

"If you can write a half decent document you may be mistaken for thinking writing for the web will be easy. However, the web requires a focus of writing rarely needed elsewhere."

Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

The Europa Web Guide is the official rulebook for the European Commission's web presence, covering editorial, legal, technical, visual and contractual aspects. All European Commission web sites must observe the rules and guidelines it contains. Web practitioners are invited to observe its contents and keep abreast of updates.

Quick accessibility checklist (by European Commission)

Writing tips from "Writing for the European Commission web presence"

“Daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions [which] predicted worse day-to-day psychological and physical health, but also greater motivation to take action aimed at changing the political system that evoked the negative emotions in the first place.”

Law 1 / Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.Law 2 / Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.Law 3 / Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity.Law 4 / Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler.Law 5 / Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other.Law 6 / Context - What lie…