signage

Installation
SKILL.md

Signage

The words on an interface are signage. A label's whole job is to let someone act without stopping to decode it. Agent-written UI fails at this in a specific, repeating way: the model reaches for the vocabulary of its own internal model of the system, or it writes a sentence where a two-word label belongs, and the result is an interface that is beautiful and unreadable.

This is a comprehension pass: the user has to know what the button does.

The test that decides every word: would you say it out loud to someone who does the audience's job, and be understood? If you would have to explain it, it is wrong on the screen. Word choice gets the test; the tells below catch the failures the test cannot see.

The tells

Cite by number in findings, so a reviewer sees the pattern rather than the instance. Copy that reads as plain English and is still unclear has no tell number - it is caught by the test alone, and reported against the test.

Vocabulary the audience does not have

  1. Internal nouns on screen. A domain term, table name, service name, or architecture word promoted to a label. The user never saw the schema. Shelf for catalogue, Answering for search, Record for the data.
  2. Invented words for ordinary things. A coined term where a standard one exists. If the industry already has a word, use the industry's word, even when it is duller.
  3. A verb nobody performs. Ingest, Surface, Reconcile, Materialise on a button. People add, save, send, check, open, compare.
  4. Abstraction as a label. Intelligence, Signal, Context, Instrument, Governance where a concrete noun would name the actual thing on screen. Keep an abstraction when it is the term of art the audience already uses in their trade - provenance in a materials library, signal in audio tools.
  5. A label naming the evidence rather than the fact. Vector-matched colour instead of Closest colour. The user wants the property; how it was derived is not the label. A market that requires the derivation disclosed is the exception, and it belongs in the value, not the label.
Installs
10
Repository
howells/skills
GitHub Stars
2
First Seen
4 days ago
signage — howells/skills