Note: The first iteration of this is launched! Go ahead and try highlighting body paragraphs and report typos as you wish!
How would you feel if you find a typo or a grammatical error on a news article from your favorite news source? How does the context and source in which you read a typo influence your reaction? More importantly, have you tried doing something about it?
From a handful of people I talked to, the answers were unanimous. Unless it's your friend's writing and it's an important writing, who cares as long as the meaning is intact?
Who cares? If I can understand it?
Even if you have all the time and motivation in the world, the costs of reporting an error traditionally heavily outweighs the benefit.
To report a typographical error, one needs to find the author's contact, inform the precise location of the error, then elaborate on the error if it was not already evident. Even then, it is not guaranteed that the author is going to review it and make the change. Clearly, the uncertainties and tedious steps do not warrant the benefit of most typos.
But what if we lower the cost to report a typo? Can we lower the effort required to report an error to cross the threshold of action?
I outlined the requirements below:
The solution should only do one thing and do it well. Keep its purpose crystal clear, avoid complexities and feature creeps.
Definitely should not require a manual to operate, nor a forum post that walks people through the steps. My benchmark is that my mom should be able to learn to use without any help.
Users need to be able to find that this feature exists.
Users must somewhat believe that their suggestion will be taken into account and that their efforts are not in vain.
I suppressed my urge to add luxurious features to keep the solution simple and laser focused on reporting typos or grammatical errors.
I kept the first iteration as the bare minimum as a proof of concept. Visitors can simply highlight any text with an error, and send the excerpt as an email to the author (me). My website will be the testing grounds for this feature to get user feedback and later in the future could potentially be a plugin for other site owners to integrate, or implement this feature as part of an existing product such as Grammarly.
I believe this MVP is an elegant solution for it's simplicity and flexibility. However, it's poor discoverability must be addressed.
It has been over a month and I have only received 1 typo report from a friend. Possible explanations include:
Although all three are reasonable contributors, in this feature update, I specifically addressed poor discoverability with a floating notifications pop up. Below I iterated on two positions.
With this in floating notification published in the Journal pages, I will continue it's popularity. In addition, I have integrated Hotjar to visitor's behaviours when encountering the new floating notification.
This decision was certainly a trade-off between discoverability and distract-ability. Having this “Report a typo” button be more prominent would only be beneficial for specific and rare use case when users are looking to report a typo but becomes a distraction in all other instances.
Also, the highlighted text can be used to identify the sentence/word of the error, minimizing burden on users to fill in information.
Even universal icons can be susceptible to varying interpretations across population and cultures. To make my design friendly to all, text label is leaves little room for misinterpretation.
Why not any of… “Report a typo or grammatical errors”, “Report an issue” or, “Send an email”? I chose “Report a typo” because:
I anticipate “report an issue” to be a vague statement and are commonly used to report severe technical issues. Whereas a "reporting a typo" is specific and casual, with the tone implying that there are no issue too small to be reported, even typos.
Poor discoverability
User Privacy
Users are required to disclose their email address to report a typo and is prone to abuse by web owners.
Web Owner Privacy
contact information of report recipient is disclosed to the public and will be prone to abuse.
Regulating ill-intended behavior
Must address spams, fictitious reports, collecting personal information, and false positives reports.
You are awesome for scrolling all the way through! I would love to get in touch with you, so please reach out via email!