✏️ Choosing between choose, click, select, & tap
If you’ve taken a glance at help centres across companies as a technical writer (or as a consumer), you’ll notice the different usage and treatment of four verbs:
Click
Tap
Select
Choose
Each verb tells users what to do next to progress in their user journey, but which one do you use and when? I’ve created style guides before and wanted to justify why I’m choosing what I did, based on findings, both academic and common knowledge.
So, here’s what I found:
‘Click’ can make your content sound dated
I’m biased, so this point might not resonate with you, but I can’t stand reading the word ‘click’ in instructions. It’s like a dad that’s trying to be cool and ‘keeping up with the times’. Telling users to ‘click’ can be dated back to when desktops started to infiltrate our homes (even before that).
Today, users aren’t chained to the bulky desktops of the 80s and 90s (and the mice that came with them). To state the obvious, users now consume information through mobile phones, tablets, and laptops with non-clickable trackpads, and in return, telling the user to ‘click’ might not apply to the tech they’re using and can make your content sound like it’s stuck in decades past.
I also argue, in the near future, ‘tap’ risks falling into this bucket, but who knows? 😄If you only use ‘click’ or ‘tap’, you can risk pigeon-holding your content and creating a change management headache
’Click’ might apply right now, especially if you’ve done user research and know the majority of your users are using your product on a desktop with a mouse. That’s great, but what happens when your user group starts using mobile more? Or what if they decide to use your product on a tablet? Or perhaps a technology that we know nothing about right now, but will be available in five or ten years’ time? Are they technically still clicking or tapping? As technologies evolve, so do user groups and the ways they are consuming information. If you diversify your verbs (or stop using some of them altogether), that’s fewer changes you (or whoever takes your place) might have to make down the road.
‘Select’ is a great, catch-all alternative for ‘click’ and ‘tap’.‘Click’ and ‘tap’ isn’t very user-friendly when considering accessibility
I think this is the most important point in this post. Over 1 billion people identify as a person with a disability (1). If you use the verbs ‘click’ and ‘tap’, it can be alienating for some users. For example, some users navigate using keyboard and mouse alternatives, eye trackers, and voice recognition to get through pages and interfaces (2).
To make your content more inclusive, try replacing ‘click’ and ‘tap’ with ‘select’. If you’re a fan of the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, it also says to avoid using ‘click’ for this reason (with a caveat, of course, if your product is mouse-only) (3).Using ‘choose’ can help avoid repetition
If you repeatedly tell your users to ‘click’, ‘tap’, or ‘select’, it can make your content sound painfully repetitive. If you’ve taken what I’ve said into consideration in the last three points, you’re really only left with ‘select’.
I recommend replacing ‘select’ with ‘choose’ each time users have more than one choice to make in the UI. For example, To continue, choose Next or Cancel. ‘Choose’ is arguably the best in this instance because, by definition, it means to select from a number of possibilities; pick by preference (4), which is technically the case in this example.
In conclusion, some of these points are personal preferences and it depends on your company and how your product works. To better communicate with users, I recommend revisiting your style guide where you might find places to apply the arguments above, especially when trying to be inclusive and to help avoid repetition.
