Written retrospectively for the 2015 archive.

A setting can seem obvious when I’ve spent all week working on the code behind it. Someone opening the settings page for the first time has a label and maybe a line of help text. They have to decide what to do with just those clues.

I want to keep getting better at writing for that person. Sometimes the clearest thing I can do is describe the result of a choice in ordinary words. Then I can read it back and ask whether I’d know what to expect if I hadn’t built the feature.