Him: I need wording for two different error messages. The person can't see anything on the portal. Me: What's the difference between the scenarios? Him: In the first, they can log in, but they have not been assigned access to any communities. In the second, they can log in, but they don't have access to any community. Me: So they are the same. Him: No, they are different. One is that they don't have any communities assigned to them. The other is that they can log in but they don't belong to a community. Me: WHAT?!?!???
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Turns out that if you call two entirely different things the same arbitrary word, when you say that a user doesn't have access to one or the other, it sounds like the same thing.
Everything's straightened out. That was infinitely harder than it needed to be.
Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :
Being a programmer, I can share your frustration over ambiguous naming.
In the system I am helping develop, we have about eight different definitions of the word "contact".
What's even worse is the word "parameter". Not only does it have several different meanings in our system, but it also has a few different meanings in programming terminology.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
One of the major things that separates clear writing from sloppy AND creative writing is that each signifier has only one signified.
It kills pun and poetry skills, but it also prevents conversations like the one above. He seemed so injured that I didn't know he was thinking of two different things in his head.