Could a high-school student explain your screen back to you?

“Operationalize intelligent remediation across the orchestration layer.”

Imagine that on a button tooltip.

Now imagine you have a customer on hold. 😂

Enterprise software has its own language. We learn it over years. Then we forget that most people never did.

Here’s the problem. The person reading your screen isn’t studying it. They’re working. They have a queue, a deadline and someone waiting. They read a label once, decide, and move on.

If the label needs a second read, some of them guess. And some of them guess wrong.

In October I rewrote the documents and screens for ClarisTXM, my independent BPO concept, against one test: could a high-school student explain each sentence back? The product requirements. The architecture notes. The product manual. The button labels.

On one pass, the editing changed 79 lines across two pages. Words only. No layout, no features. Just sentences someone could read once.

It sounds simple. It wasn’t. 🤔

Plain writing is harder than jargon. Jargon lets you skip the thinking. “Intelligent remediation” lets you avoid saying what actually happens. A plain sentence forces you to know: who does what to what.

If you can’t say it plainly, you might not know what it does yet.

That’s the Blank Canvas part. Sometimes the words weren’t the only thing that changed.

One example. An agent finishes a call, records the outcome, then presses a button to move on. The button said Save and next account. But the outcome was already saved the moment it was recorded. The button saved nothing.

So it became Next account. Because that’s what it does.

A small change. But a person who thinks a button saves their work, when it doesn’t, will one day lose work they thought was safe.

Here are the rules I use now.

1. 1Use words a high-school student knows. “Use”, not “leverage”. “Check”, not “validate”.
2. 2Make each sentence say who does what to what. “The rule picks the accounts. You decide who to call.”
3. 3One idea per sentence. Short and complete.
4. 4Explain a technical word the first time, or leave it out. Your reader shouldn’t need a glossary.
5. 5Stay plain, never childish. Adults at work don’t want cartoon language either.

One more rule I like for apps: name each one with a verb and an object. “Prioritise Accounts.” “Review Exceptions.” You know what it does before you open it.

None of this is dumbing down. The people reading your screens are smart. They’re just busy.

Respecting their time is the whole point.