In my DevFest talk a couple of weeks ago, I cautioned developers about using jargon. I got a question about the use of jargon via email, which I’ll paraphrase like this:
I often use jargon when I talk to my customers. I wanted to show them my IT skills and build trust. Should I always avoid jargon?
This is an awesome point. One of your goals when you are talking to users is to build rapport with them. By building rapport, you make them more comfortable in sharing information with you, and it’s information that you need.
I think that you should use jargon with users, but you need to be careful about it. You should avoid introducing jargon into your conversation with your user yourself. You don’t want to lead them to using a term that they know but don’t naturally use themselves. You want to hear the term that they naturally use. If you hear that enough people don’t use the jargon that you use, but instead use something else, you might want to change how you refer to this item to match their own terminology.
You should listen closely to how they refer to something. If they use jargon to refer to that thing, use that same jargon to refer to the same thing. Be careful to ensure that you understand exactly what they mean when they use that term. One of the examples that I gave was in the case of looking through log files: “event”, “alarm”, and “alert” are often used in log files. Different log files use those terms in very different manners. I’ve seen log files where “event” meant “something very bad has happened”, and I’ve seen log files where “event” meant “something has happened; could be good, could be bad, could be neutral”. If you were talking to users about troubleshooting and they used the word “event”, you should clarify with them what “event” means to them to ensure that you are using “event” in the same way that they are. If you assume that you’re using “event” in the same way, but they mean something different than you do, you could make erroneous inferences based on that misunderstanding.