What’s the biggest problem with “86 Percent of Users May Leave a Website When Asked to Create an Account”
The biggest problem with this statement (apart from the excessive title case), is ‘may’ is a weak word. What does ‘may’ mean?
A quick search on Google defines it as ‘expressing possibility’.
It certainly doesn’t assure us that an average of 86 percent of users leave a website when asked to create an account. The use of ‘may’ suggests that all 86 percent of these users will stay.
A just as meaningful title for this infographic would be ‘186 Percent of Users May Leave a Website When Asked to Create an Account’ or even ‘86 Percent of Users May Burn Down Their House When Asked to Create an Account’.
IT is a very black and white domain. We work with machines, machines built on the principles of mathematics. IT is a science. In my area of expertise I’m required to document the requirements of a system prior to it being built. Weak words like ‘may’ are the bane of this phase. Too often requirements are written as follows:
‘A user may create an account.’
So… can the user create an account? If ‘may’ expresses possibility, then quite likely the user can’t create an account. A functional requirement needs to be measurable to ensure we can prove it’s fulfilled. How do you measure the word ‘may’? Coming back to ‘expresses possibility’, we can measure this requirement by the possibility that it’s fulfilled.
Omitting user accounts from a project cuts out a chunk of complexity and build time. This requirement suggests we can do that. I’m pretty sure the client would interpret this requirement as ‘I’m getting user accounts’ though. You can see where this starts to deteriorate…
I’m not suggesting that Wiliam would not fulfil requirements that contain that word ‘may’, of course we would. This is more a linguistic comment that poor choice of words doesn’t help us.
In closing, the infographic is nice, but clean up the wording. IT and facts in general require stronger words than ‘may’…
