Unfamiliar words can cause confusion and misunderstandings for users. To write clear, easy-to-understand digital content, we must avoid jargon.

Definition: Jargon is the specialized language used by a particular profession or group, which is unfamiliar or meaningless to outsiders

Jargon Is Relative
There’s a big obstacle to dealing with technical or professional jargon — jargon is relative. In other words, whether or not a given word counts as jargon depends on who is reading it. The same word can be meaningful to you, but meaningless to your reader.

For example, my husband John is an environmental engineer. He can read the phrase “enhanced reductive dechlorination” and know exactly what it means. He can picture the process in his mind, and can think back to projects he’s worked on that involved it.

Meanwhile, to me (and perhaps to you), that phrase is unintelligible. I might be able to make some guesses as to what it means, but they won’t be anywhere close to the depth of meaning that John sees in the phrase.

(As a field, UX has more than its fair share of jargon. The ever expanding set of terminology is a major obstacle for communicating with people who don’t work in UX, as well as a barrier for new people trying to break into it.)

Two Key Questions for Dealing with Jargon
To decide what to do with a particular jargon word, you’ll need to answer two important questions:

Do my readers know this term and concept?
How important is it that I use this particular term?
We use the answers to these 2 questions to help us decide how to handle the term.

How many readers will know this term? If the answer is “most or all,” use the term without explanation. If the answer is “some, few, or none,” then move on to the second question. How important is this term? If the answer is “somewhat or very,” use the term with an in-context explanation. If the answer is “not important,” then use a plain-language alternative instead of the jargon term.
Use this decision tree to help you choose how to handle technical terminology in your writing.
1. How Many Readers Will Know This Term?
Consider whether this specific term will be meaningful technical language or meaningless gibberish to your audience.

If you happen to be writing for a narrow audience composed entirely of domain experts, then this question will be easier to answer. If you also know that all those domain experts went through an education or training that taught them a formally defined and shared vocabulary, it becomes even easier.

For example, if I’m writing content for a niche audience of orthopedic surgeons, I can be fairly confident about the technical terminology that this group will know. Content creators who are writing for professions like medicine, science, law, and architecture have this advantage.

However, many content teams don’t have such narrow audiences with uniform background knowledge. Instead, your user groups may have a broad range of experience and education levels. In these cases, only some users may know the term well.

Turn to user research to look for clues as to whether your users are familiar with specific terms. In particular, consider using these methods:

Search and keyword logs: Look at your analytics data to see which search terms people are using. If your users’ queries frequently include a specific term, that’s usually a strong sign that the term is at least somewhat familiar.
Interviews and surveys: Pay attention to the language your users use when they speak to you — either in qualitative interviews or in open-text fields in surveys.
Usability testing: Observe your users as they read your content, and listen for their feedback. Which terminology is confusing or unclear?
If Most Readers Know the Term, Use It Without Explanation
In situations where your audience is very familiar with a term, you can probably safely use that term without including any explanation or plain-language alternative.

In fact, if you happen to be writing for a narrow audience of experts, explaining a commonly known, basic term may backfire. In our studies of how domain experts consume content, we learned that they are constantly assessing online content to see if it was written at their level, or for a basic audience. Explaining a term that should be well-known in the field might make your audience believe that your content wasn’t written for them.

If Only Some or None of Your Readers Know the Term
If you don’t believe that most or all of your readers know the term, then you shouldn’t simply use that word or phrase without any context or explanation. In fact, you may want to avoid using it at all. To determine which approach you should take, you’ll need to answer our second question.

2. How Important Is This Term?
This question is about whether you really need to use this technical term at all. To answer it, consider:

Is this a term that users need to learn, if they don’t already know it?
Will this specific term be more meaningful to this audience than the plain-language alternative?
How much does this term contribute to the message of this content?
For example, if I’m writing an article about getting started in investing, I might want to use the term “index fund.” But how important is it that I use that exact phrase, given that my audience of novice investors will probably not know it? Since the point of the piece is to educate those new investors (and since they’ll need to learn that term to invest successfully) it’s likely very important that I use it and teach users what it means.

If the Term Is Not Important
If all or most of your readers will be unfamiliar with the term, and they don’t really need to learn it, then it’s best to avoid using that term altogether.

For example, if you work in healthcare and write content for patients, at some point you might be tempted to use the term “reconstructive surgery.” That may have a specific, unique meaning to people who have healthcare experience and training. But if it doesn’t have a specific, unique meaning to your audience (patients), then it’s best to use a plain-language alternative — for example, “surgery.” The result may not have the same medical meaning, but if it doesn’t matter to your readers, then avoid confusing them with unfamiliar language.

If the Term Is Somewhat or Very Important
This situation is the trickiest to deal with — the term is important enough that it should be used, but you anticipate that many or most of your users won’t be familiar with it. In these situations, two strategies are particularly helpful:

Use both the plain-language alternative and technical term together.
Explain the concept in context in a way that is meaningful for your audience.
Using Both the Technical Term and Plain-Language Alternative
When working with a term that is important but unfamiliar, quickly establish the word’s meaning by placing it next to a plain-language alternative.

During a usability test, a participant who worked in healthcare was looking up information about a genetic condition that one of her patients was suffering from. She encountered the following sentence in a medical reference site that catered to both healthcare professionals and patients.

When DRPLA appears before age 20, it most often involves episodes of involuntary muscle jerking or twitching (myoclonus), seizures, behavioral changes, intellectual disability, and problems with balance and coordination (ataxia).

The participant pointed out that she appreciated the site’s use of technical terms alongside the plain-language explanation.

“I think this is actually a really good page, mainly because they do include both technical terminology as well as lay terminology. ‘Muscle jerking and twitching,’ they call this, ‘myoclonus.’ [Without this term] I might’ve thought they were referring to something like dyskinesia, because that’s also defined as involuntary movement. So, it’s good that they actually do put specific names on here.”

Including both versions of the term worked well for all users, whether familiar or unfamiliar with it: it allowed healthcare professionals to understand the technical term’s specific meaning, while also avoiding confusing patients.

If you anticipate that most of your audience will not be familiar with the term, lead with the plain-language version in this format:

[plain-language alternative] ([technical term])

muscle jerking (myoclonus)

On the other hand, if you expect that the majority of your audience will be familiar with the term, but some users won’t be, you can flip the order:

[technical term] ([plain language alternative])

myoclonus (muscle jerking)

This approach works well because the parentheses act as a signal that the text inside them is secondary — unless you’re confused and need to slow down for extra clarification, you can skip over the text in the parentheses and continue to scan the content.

Make the Term Meaningful in Context
When explaining a jargon term, it isn’t enough to simply provide a textbook definition. You must make the term meaningful to their specific situation and context.

As an example, let’s consider a consumer shopping for a diamond engagement ring. Diamonds are rated on various esoteric scales to help assess their value. One of those scales is the Gemological Institute of America’s International Color Scale.

Brilliant Earth, a diamond jewelry retailer, explains this scale on a page titled Diamond Color Scale:

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) developed the International Color Scale to bring consistency in labeling diamond color. This scale addresses color and clarity with a jury system that evaluates every diamond. The five-person jury must unanimously agree on the grade for the diamond to receive GIA certification.


Brilliant Earth’s site provides a detailed explanation of the International Color Scale for diamonds.
While that explanation may be helpful for someone interested in diamond and jewelry industry, it isn’t all that helpful for someone trying to buy their first diamond. That person may not care about the five-person jury required to grade a GIA-certified diamond. Instead, they are likely wondering:

What do these letters mean?
What’s the best color quality I can get for my money?
Will I even notice the color once it’s in a ring?
Is it worth spending more to get a diamond with a better rating?
VRAI, a lab-grown diamond company, did good job addressing those questions on its product listing pages. Alongside a list of its available loose diamonds, it provided filters for diamond characteristics. Next to each characteristic was an i icon, which could be clicked or tapped to reveal an explanation of that characteristic.


VRAI provided explanatory tooltips for each of the diamond characteristic filters on its diamond listing page.
This tooltip approach works well in cases where the jargon term needs more explanation than a simple plain-language alternative. Users who don’t need the extra explanation aren’t bothered by it, and users who do need it can easily access the information without leaving their current page or screen.

In addition to an illustration of the color range, the tooltip included this explanation:

Color ratings are difficult to discern unless two diamonds are compared directly side-by-side. Colorless diamonds are more rare but near-colorless ones offer greater value.


VRAI’s tooltip provided plain language categories for each of the esoteric letter ratings: colorless, near colorless, and faintly colored.
AAA: Always Avoid Acronyms
One final note about acronyms, which are a particularly insidious form of professional jargon: Acronyms can be understood only if the reader has already encountered, learned, and memorized what the letters stand for. Additionally, the same series of letters can stand for many different things.

For example, “GTA” could represent:

The video game Grand Theft Auto
The electronic music group Good Times Ahead
The metropolitan area of Greater Toronto
It’s generally a good idea to write these acronyms out in their full form, using the same parentheses approach as we’d use to connect another technical term to its plain language meaning. That does add to your word count slightly, but it is always an acceptable tradeoff if it improves clarity.

There are some situations where the acronym may be more widely recognized than the full term. For example, many investors may be familiar with the concept of an “ETF” but may not actually know that the acronym stands for “exchange-traded fund.” In these cases, it may actually be better to use the acronym than the full phrase — just remember to clearly define the concept.

When defining the acronym, use the format of:

[full phrase] ([acronym])

This is the standard method to quickly connect the acronym to its full form. For example:

chain of custody (CoC)

It’s a good idea to connect the full phrase to the acronym like this at the beginning of the piece. If you’re writing a long piece (like a long article with many subheadings), be sure to include the acronym connection at the beginning of each major section — remember that people don’t read digital content linearly or completely, so you’ll want to ensure that your readers will still understand the acronym if they begin reading further down the page.

Conclusion
The appropriate jargon-handling strategy depends on how many of your users know the jargon term and how important that term is in your context.

And jargon isn’t just a problem in your customer-facing content! Be mindful of UX jargon with all your communication, including emails and presentations.