Mrs Miggins and Posh Nappy Cream

About 18 months ago I was lucky enough to attend a PR course run by some highly experienced and very talented individuals. One of the key messages that I took away from the course was the need to convey your message in a simple way. Make it easy for whomever on the receiving end to understand your intent, to understand your message.

So whether it’s the woman in the street, the bloke in the pub, the man on the Clapham Omnibus, your Gran or Mrs Miggins (whomsoever she might be, Blackadder fans), they get it, they understand your message; Keep It Simple Stupid.

In the testing industry I’m worried that this concept might have been lost. In some cases deliberately so.

We use lots of different words and phrases to mean the same things and the same words and phrases to mean lots of different things. For some it’s almost a badge of honour to use deliberately obtuse or ambiguous terminology. It makes them feel special. Equally there have been efforts to attempt to standardise how we describe our world. And these have not always been well received. There is an almost religious fervour in some quarters to preserve a given frame of the world.

The thing is, the “customers” of testing are not often well versed in how we talk about our world between ourselves. In fact, to my mind, if you have to go out of your way to explain yourself, even just the language and terminology you use, not even what it all actually means, then something isn’t quite right.

And so there’s no wonder that testing as a discipline can, at times, seem fairly opaque, and switches non-testers (and even some testers themselves) off by being hard to understand, and generally laced in jargonese.

Isn’t it time we started thinking like the folk who we consider our customers and addressing them in terms that are meaningful to them; framing the world in their terms, not ours?

Think about the trip to the garage with a car that creaks going over potholes. The technician describes a fault with your car in long, complex, confusing automotive jargon, that ultimately ends with an amount of confusion on your part, and then a placatory simple statement in response such as “your suspension is broken, you need a new spring”. Isn’t that akin to how some testers talk to the business about testing, especially when it comes to things that aren’t as expected..

Wouldn’t it be nice if every engagement was easy to understand, framed in terms meaningful to you and hence really allowed you to understand what was going on and the consequences of that?

So what of the title?

Well, I know some of you grow bored of my cycling anecdotes, but there are two key “products” in my cycling regime; Embrocation Cream and Chamois Cream. To quote the bloke in the Rapha shop, “one goes on your legs, the other on your undercarriage, and definitely don’t mix the two up”.

One is in effect Deep Heat in thick Vaseline, designed to be rubbed in to your legs before a ride to give you additional warmth in your muscles when cycling in cold weather (and stings like hell when you bathe or shower afterwards!), the other is to protect the vital bits inside your shorts from friction and the impact of moisture on long rides. A sort of dreadfully expensive herbal moisturiser.

And how would I explain this to my Gran?

Posh nappy cream for cyclists. That smells nice.

 Job done.