AEAChicago2007 – “Writing the User Interface” by Jeffrey Zeldman

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interfaces are mostly text
try going to a website in a foreign language and see if you can
	tell how to interact
content drives traffic - i.e. boingboing
words + how big they are + where they are
THIS IS WHY...  1. All sites have big writing / editorial budgets. 
2. All sites (especially big ones) have a content czar. 
yeah right. so what do we do?
"Thinking with Type"
one of the most humane features of design is to help people read less.
guide copy explains what the site's about and how to interact with it
should be brief, clear, and enable you to do things
Veer is a nice site for buying fonts, pictures, etc.
Khoi Vinh saw Zeldman give this talk, and now the NYTimes subscription
	wall page has a link
if copy doesn't set tone, the design can (i.e. e-cards for tween girls)
but needs to be audience-appropriate
"Understanding Your Medicare Benefits.  You must have Flash installed
	and JavaScript enabled."
project management is a tough job - moment of appreciation
Basecamp's login "we'll send you right along" is friendly
Joyent "Take a tour and we'll prove it." instead of "Read more about
	our services."
give us a chance to make a value proposition
Flickr - must appear to be easy to use
"copy" copy - doesn't have to be as brief, can be silly
XHTML fist shirt has six fingers....
brand copy - taglines, blog subheads, etc.
forgetting to write a sentence of introduction totally lose a visitor
Marley's daughter's clothing site's shopping cart is way too formal,
	not reggae
Lulu's about page guy in a suit in heaven with huge amounts of text
	really doesn't work
labels can reinforce your brand - Cap Gemini's "how we work together"
URLs can be labels - name them for humans
reading online might be more fatiguing than reading print, but studies
	are unclear
compare a versus b
Attack of the Zombie Copy
Your About Page is a Robot
how do you reconcile people-read-less with SEO?
cutting the fat and natural language help both
so does using markup so important words are in headlines
can sometimes get funding for editing content by saying will help SEO
what are some questions to determine what's brand-appropriate?
discovery process. what materials have you already produced
	about yourselves?
what do you know about your stakeholders? compare with real users.
there are no good books about copy
there are good ones about writing for the web, but they don't address
	these issues - i.e. Crawford Kilian, Writing for the Web
Zeldman is thinking of writing this
pronouns in copy?  used to be more we, now with blogging more I

ETA: Fixed spelling of Kilian, after seeing his discussion of I versus we prompted by these notes.