Explaining legal concepts clearly for our products requires multiple rounds of editing alongside lawyers, testing with our audience, and rewriting. Here’s a few things we’ve learned about creating plain English legal content for digital products.
You don’t have to sacrifice accuracy for readability
Being accessible doesn’t mean dumbing things down. Avoid jargon, acronyms, and passive language. Even though these are common and can be useful in legal writing, they make sentences clunky and harder to read. For instance, use traditional question words to start questions. Who, what, why, where, how and do are easy to spot as questions. For example, if you need to assess someone’s income, “Are you currently in paid work?” takes longer to understand than “Do you currently have a job that you get paid for?”
Narrow in on a specific audience and use case so you can avoid those really pesky edge cases.
Do the research upfront to understand who the audience is and what value they get from your digital product.
Write for people who don’t have time to read deeply.
Even though you might be recording all the content in one place (like a content management system or a word document), your audience will likely just interact with snippets on different pages, and in a different order than you would expect. People read online content differently than printed material. Meaning gets lost in long paragraphs, so keep it short and scannable.
Never assume someone remembers how to do something.
Educate your audience on the process and repeat key messages. While being concise is important, always give context of what you want them to do and why. For instance, using action and benefit structure for explaining why you are asking the questions creates trust and improves repeated success in answering questions (’We’re going to ask you about X, so that you can do Y’)
Make interactive functions explicit, while also using repeated design patterns and visual cues.
Make use of descriptive text and button titles to specifically communicate the purpose and value of the function. Saying things like ‘click here’ isn’t as as clear as providing a highlighted link on the relevant keywords.
Put the supporting information as close as possible to the confusion.
Not everyone needs help, but some people will. If there’s a chance that something could be confusing or misunderstood, explain it further. Put progressively disclosed help text and supporting content in obvious, easy to find, and repeatable places.
Create a standardised structure
Just like with a visual design system, repeating content patterns teaches people how to use your product while they’re using it. Repeating a content structure across all sections establishes user reading patterns and reduces cognitive load. Designing page templates that exemplify content functions and tone of voice will give your product a consistent, repeated content structure.