

Official Android writing style guide - pizza
http://developer.android.com/design/style/writing.html

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leviathan
"Your phone needs to communicate with Google servers to sign in to your
account. This may take up to five minutes"

Programmers, in trying to be completely transparent, sometimes get confused
and think that the user actually cares how the app is doing what it needs to
do.

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jamesbritt
_... sometimes get confused and think that the user actually cares how the app
is doing what it needs to do._

Can you share some links to research showing what users _do_ care about, or
research showing that they actually not not care how the app is doing what it
needs to do?

~~~
leviathan
A user might be interested in knowing that the app wants to "connect to
google" but that same user might not care to know that the app wants to "start
a tcp session with google servers in order to connect to a web service that
gives it the required data"

Obviously I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.

~~~
jamesbritt
_Obviously I'm exaggerating, but you get the point._

I understand what it is you think is true, and anecdotally it sounds about
right, but I'm hoping to get past folklore and guesswork to understand what
does or does not work for users.

I've been surprise, when helping ostensibly non-tech people, the number of
times I get asked, "OK, but _why_ " when I try to offer a simplified
description of what an app is doing.

If something seems to take a long time, and I were to say, "The program needs
to connect to Google," I am certain the people I've helped would want to know
a bit more.

Maybe details about TCP sessions would be too much; the question is, based on
_actual research_ , what is the right amount of detail, and how should it be
presented?

Maybe there is no such research; even knowing that would be helpful.

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jordanthoms
I like how the bad examples all come from previous versions of Android!

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bthomas
They compare "77 other people +1'd this, including Larry Page." to "Larry Page
and 77 others +1'd this."

The latter definitely sounds better, but I suspect most users care more about
# of likes than an individual person, as usually the individuals aren't
particularly noteworthy.

I'd rather separate these two pieces -- a larger icon with # of likes, and a
list of people to the right

~~~
abraham
The significance is not in the individual person itself it is in that they
know the individual person and will have a deeper connection with them than a
number of unknown people they have never met.

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RobAtticus
I feel like the third example should be "What do you want to do?" rather than
"Do you want to close it?" The way it is now, I expect a Yes/No question, but
instead I get 3 actions.

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sohn12
lol android

~~~
chmod775
I sometimes wonder what's wrong with humanity when someone creates an account
just to say something like this.

