Brevity

To me this is obvious, but somehow everyone gets this wrong. Everyone is way too verbose.

Slides presentation

Use speaker notes. Don’t put every word on the slide. Don’t make long bullets. Don’t over explain. If you are worried about a leave behind, make a separate document for that. For your presentation, less than 10 words max per slide.

Resume

I have been working 30 years. My resume is one page. No one is reading your bullet points. Say less. Fit on one page.

Case studies

Use hotjar. No one is reading your long explanation. Make a link to more detail if you feel compelled. Just make it shorter.

Emails and slacks

Get the point. Stop adding in niceties and “how are you?” filler text. just get to the point. Make it easy to read and understand.

PRDs (requirements docs)

A wall of text is not helpful. It shuts down comments and the ability for people to have a dialog about the requirements. Be concise. Don’t repeat the same requirement 10 times.

User interface

Don’t put a lot of text into your UI. Not in tooltips, not next to forms. If you need contextual help, build contextual help. User interfaces with a lot of words are terrible. Users don’t read! At best, they skim and usually not that.

Social media posts

Get to the point. I miss 144 character limits.

Alexa and other AI

I wish Alexa had a “ultra concise mode”. When I ask it “When do the warriors play next?” the answer currently is “the Warriors play the Timberwolves next Friday, December 12th, at 7pm at Chase Center.” I already have concise mode active. The ultra-concise answer would be “Friday, 7pm”. If I wanted more details, I would ask for more details.

ChatGPT is terrible at brevity. Ugh, I want to kill whomever thought it was a good idea for it to be so chatty.

Speaking with executives

Executives have a lot of input happening. You would think they need all of the details in your request, but they don’t. They need the bare minimum, and they can ask follow up questions. Don’t start with every detail. Start with the basics and let them ask.

Help docs

Pictures and videos are thousands of times better than words. Use animated gifs too!

Summary

We all need to practice brevity and design it into our products and process. More signal, less noise.