Nobody likes jargon.

Least of all, anyone who does not understand it.

I mentioned this with a fellow usability soul recently and the conversation soon degenerated into a shared rant about the hangover of web design conventions that all too often leave us with websites littered with buttons that say Submit, Reset, and Post.

Well fine if you have become numbed to it over the years using the web and accept it, but for so many people that are light users of the web, do those terms really resonate with what they want to do once they have visit your page?

Are they really clamouring to submit?

Think for a moment how Facebook pays attention to the vernacular of it’s calls to actions.

You don’t post comments to a blog, you write on a wall.

Facebook tune in to the psychology of users because the subtleties of language have a massive impact.

A recent study by Dan Zarrella, earmarked Don’t “Submit” To Landing Page Button Text cogently illustrates the weakness of using the default text for the button by revealing the comparative Click Through efficacy of buttons that did not use the word ‘submit’.

The conclusion: submit stinks.

I am an advocate of customer centric thinking and use the mighty Get Satisfaction service for a client.

Get Satisfaction relentlessly position themselves as a customer champion.

Yet even there I notice jargon creep in their widgets with the inclusion of the dreaded word post tucked into their interface.

Jargon is ineffective and exclusionary but it seems that JarGon marches on and still exists in too many places.