language

Making technical terms more descriptive

How do you find the best name or title for a function in an application? For example, if creating software for sound editing - many traditional audio terms are very technical, such as "normalization", "amplitude envelope", "dynamic compression" etc. For a novice user, these terms don't say much about what will happen to the sound. Might it be desirable to come up with new, more descriptive terms for these things, despite the risk of confusing advanced users who already know the technical terms? How would one find a term that as many users as possible can understand?

Pragmatic language theory and usability theory... same same or what?

Being a product of the school of pragmatic language theory it have
always puzzled me that (some) usability folk are very eager to
distinguish their field from language and semiotic theory.

Honstly I don't see a big difference. By removing themselves from
language theory, they are cuting themselves of from several hundreds
of years of research on which they could be building their branch of
communicative theory.

- it's all about communicating
- it's all about receivers
- it's all about context

What am I missing?

Best practices for Country location and languages on Global Websites (was Language Picker)

Jason,

Did you read my mind I was just about to send out a similar post.

My line of thought was about best practices on how users select countries and languages on global websites.

A few questions...
Should sites auto detect IP addresses and serve default settings according to country, language?
Should users have ability to chose their preferred country and language preferences off a splash page as in Ikea.com on a first visit (and/or subsequent visits) and have the ability to change at will?

Field labels for non-native speakers of English

Hi all,

I'm currently involved in a redesign of a registration form aimed primarily
at native English speakers, but with increasing use by non-native speakers,
especially from Asia. Unfortunately, using non-english labels is out of
scope for the time being.

Has anyone come across research on which name field labels are most readily
understood by non-native speakers?

a) surname, last name, family name
b) given name, first name

Any recommendations on these or other easily confused form labels would be
much appreciated.

Thanks, Marcus