At the end of last week FCG held a two-day seminar on web usability in Vantaa, Finland. The first day’s expert was Raino Vastamäki from Adage, and on the second day I spoke about the usability of web text. For several years the public sector has focused on the usability of the user interface, and the results have been good. However, I believe that too little attention has been paid to online text in the public sector. My view got support from a survey by Adage – the report will be published early next year – in which they have classified the errors identified in usability tests and heuristic analyses covering ten years. The most frequent problem areas were: 1) forms 2 ) links and buttons 3 ) menus and breadcrumbs 4 ) titles 5) body text 6) search. So in the twenty problem areas Adage identified, two of the top five issues are clearly language-related issues. Now it is the time to focus on text usability.

Artspeak – like any speech – should clarify and not blur the issues it deals with. Verbalizing art is a demanding task, because the content of artworks is often abstract and difficult. In this tough task, artspeak sometimes becomes so convoluted that it itself needs interpretation. Only with difficulty can the average visitor to an art exhibition distinguish contemporary art from modern. Moreover, he still has to ponder, along with the author of the exhibition catalogue, whether abjection is a relevant concept in the analysis of contemporary art and whether the artwork speaks of presence orabsence of presence. The Kiasma Museum narrowed the gap by publishing a contemporary art glossary related to its Hits exhibition, a welcome attempt to increase the readability of artspeak. The glossary will hopefully help authors to write about art in layman’s terms, so that an exhibition visitor does not need a dictionary to interpret the catalogue. However, providing such a glossary treats only the symptoms and not the problem.

If you’re Finnish, you should try the innovative online service, Kuntalaisaloite.fi (”Citizen Initiatives”), where you can submit ideas to improve your local community. The Ministry of Justice provides this service, and in the first month more than a hundred municipalities have joined. The ministry has succeeded in making the service delightfully usable: the menu is short, the text is light, and the functionality is functional. Once you sign up with your e-mail address, you’ll receive a link to a web form for submitting your idea. You can choose to include your name or to have it not appear on the site’s list, which currently has about one hundred such ideas. These include five issues related to Tampere: people want Helsinki-style taxi-buses, more benches for the elderly, recognition for former athletes, equality in wages, and opportunities to learn about mental health issues. Across Finland, issues related to traffic are probably the most popular topic, but citizens in Ranua are demanding that officials reply to e-mail, and citizens in Helsinki want the library to stock the television series “The Wire.” The Kuntalaisaloite.fi service is a way to turn complaining into influencing.

The influential Aamulehti newspaper has begun criticizing Twitter. “Messages are usually one-liners and rarely have content. For the most part humbug… People’s posts are mainly nonsense and harmful to themselves.” Editor-in-chief Jorma Pokkinen has already declared himself an opponent of social media, but just last week he attacked the Finnish Lutheran Church’s ‘twermons’. “The new religion’s name is Twitter-Tweet. People can’t find great truths in coffee-shop chatter, and that’s all that tweeting is. The article I’m writing has 3671 characters; I’m off to get a coffee and figure out how to get that down to 140 characters.” Elsewhere in the paper interviewees from carefully chosen groups praise the superiority of paper compared to electronic communications: “The reader has not rejected the printed paper”, “My paper is a part of my breakfast”, “I’m not going to start my computer; I want to read the paper.” Condensing Pokkinen’s message into a single tweet is actually simple: “Don’t use social media—subscribe to our paper.” (46 characters). I do understand that the print media going to defend its own business interests; they’re not ready to admit, “Hey, guys, we’re losing this game.”

The ARea 13 seminar was organized in connection with MindTrek to explore augmented reality. AR means bringing virtual material into the physical world. The seminar demos illustrated how reality can supplemented by our human creations – for example by using the free Wikitudeapplication. I was particularly inspired by the Nomadi smartphone application which gives you a virtual tour of Tampere or helps you create and share your own travel route. Nomadi will automatically record the route and you can add points along the route, together with your own comments and pictures. Useful reality supplementing is still taking baby steps, but the experiments are creating the future. Big issues are usability and the quality of the content: ads, vague text and video on the cell phone screen do not provide a very addictive experience. But while we wait for smart glassesand a better user experience, we can examine augmented reality guidesand try out ways to use them.

MindTrek, a three-day conference for digital media and business, is a distinctive event. This year, as sometimes in the past, the theme seemed unfocused – “Discovering Tomorrow” – but in a way that also increased the surprise and appeal. Ville Oksanen delivered an inspiring talk on privacy and cloud services. He contends that Finland should present itself as a cloud service center. Finland’s advantage, apart from location and know-how, is a solid reputation for protecting privacy, a reputation untainted by illegal surveillance. The shining star of the seminar was of course Steve Wozniak, who was interviewed via video. While not saying anything revolutionary, the laid-back legend discussed the importance of technology in learning. He pointed out that Apple has always been able to show how its devices improve the user’s quality of life. Teemu Arina illustrated the life of a biohacker: when he got ill he began to measure and analyze his body functions and, based on the data he found, built a personal nutrition and fitness program instead of seeking treatment through drugs. The most interesting MindTrek panels dealt with crowdsourcing. The good news is that no one wonders any more whether people will participate. Pia Erkinheimo argued convincingly that people will participate in crowdsourcing if it is well organized. – And speaking of organizing, MindTrek’s scheduling and communication were often haphazard. Along with discovering tomorrow, the organizers needs to discover better preparation.

One of my most enjoyable readings this summer was Anne Mäntynen’s dissertation ”How one talks about language”, because its observations apply so well to The Word of the Week. Her study deals with the rhetoric of language columns, and her source material consisted of 204 newspaper articles. The structure of such articles has remained surprisingly similar since the 1900s: they usually begin with an example and end with a recommendation. The article opens with a quotation or a reference, as well as a question. That opening often includes a loose reference to time –often, nowadays, a few years ago – or, nearly as often, connects some aspect of language to a current debate. The text itself proceeds from problem to solution, from question to answer, from specific to general, or vice versa. Writers describe good language with adjectives like short, clear, smooth, and bad language with words such as redundant, obscure, awkward. Mäntynen’s study insightfully illuminates how a writer builds expertise into his story. He appeals to authorities, shows that he knows them, and includes examples from his own work. The key authorities here are the Finnish Language Board and the Institute for the Languages of Finland in addition to dictionaries. The Finnish word for such language columns, pakina, could be translated as anecdote in English, though sometimes the only person who’d find them amusing would be another Finnish linguist.

Last week in Sofia, I encountered a shortcoming in my knowledge: I haven’t ever studied the Cyrillic alphabet. Simply having to deal with a foreign language makes ordinary tasks a challenge; a foreign script poses a real usability problem. My visit also corrected a few misconceptions: 1) Even though we often speak about Russian letters, they were originally Bulgarian. The alphabet was developed in the 800s for Old Church Slavonic, the predecessor of modern Bulgarian; “Cyrillic” comes from Saint Cyril who helped create the first alphabet for Slavonic languages. 2) I had thought that the Greek alphabet would be quite close to the Cyrillic. It is not, even though Cyril was from Thessaloniki and the characters were developed from the Greek alphabet. 3) You might assume that signs in the center of the capital would appear in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. You would be mistaken. Next week, my trip to St. Petersburg will provide further study of the Cyrillic alphabet. – Finally, a quick quiz question: You can write a name of a certain Finnish city in the same way with either Latin or Cyrillic letters. What’s thecity?

The fourth session of the non-fiction writer’s course arranged by the Association of Finnish Non-fiction Writers dealt with social media. For background information, I used Twitter and Facebook to ask authors and other book people about their work-related use of social media. Over thirty writers replied and the answers suggest that an isolated writer can find a professional community online. Keeping current with your field is vital for a writer, but he needs to use filters to avoid information overload. Many respondents said that they are choosing motifs and interviewees for their books from online discussions. A few writers have tried out different plot twists and literary approaches online prior to writing the final version. Information flows smoothly in social networks, as long as it’s not overt marketing. Authors have also reaped concrete benefits: contacts, job offers, even publishing contracts. So online discussion brings a lot of good, though it also takes time from writing. As experienced IT-writer Petteri Järvinen summed it up: You can’t have them all.

The Ministry of Education has set up a task force to promote the use of plain language in government writing. One of their first acts was to solicit feedback about official communications. In my feedback I drew attention to communications training in the public sector as well as the use of social media. Training in plain language needs to reach the experts, not only those who produce the final documents. In the public sector, we need to increase awareness about language and its meaning: basic skills of composition are not enough when writing is the core of the work. Also, training methods should be adapted to highly-educated busy professionals. Social media, in turn, brings an important new element to public sector: interaction. Direct conversational communication teaches people how to simplify complex issues; this has been the case at the Finnish tax agency and at Kela, which effectively guides people via online discussion forums. Everyday speech closes the language gap between public officials and citizens.