Office Hack #34 — Unbounce’s Dejargonator
Envoy is all about making things easier and more fun in the office. In that spirit, we are proud to bring you our new Envoy Office Hacks podcast series. Every week, we deliver the coolest, most ingenious, and just plain fun fixes people have invented to improve efficiency and productivity in their workplace.
Today’s Envoy Office Hack has grand aspirations. It wants to rid the internet of meaningless jargon. You know, those empty words and altogether made-up lingo that can creep into company websites and product descriptions? Yeah.. those.
Meet Dan Levy. Dan is head of content at Unbounce, a company that makes landing pages for web marketers.
You could say Dan is a stickler for language. As a former journalist, he was struck by the overuse of jargon by web developers when he first came to Unbounce.
His point: marketing terms like state-of-the-art and next-generation don’t actually mean anything when describing a company’s service or product. In fact, he sees jargon as a lost opportunity to get more specific about what you are really offering.
After his first gentle suggestions to curb jargon went unnoticed at Unbounce, Dan created The Dejargonator. It is a lighthearted attempt to identify tech jargon, and explain why it should be abandoned in favor of more descriptive language. Dan says, tongue-in-cheek, that it’s meant to shame you into using (not utilizing!) plainer English.
The Dejargonator is a browser extension that you can get at the Chrome store.
Add it to your Chrome browser then go to a jargon-heavy landing page to test it out. You may know a few. If not, Dan created one here for youto try, but it will work on any web page.
Initiate The Dejargonator in the upper right hand corner of Chrome (see the exclamation mark in blue) and… just like magic, the offending vocabulary is revealed!
Dan says The Dejargonator has had a positive effect at Unbounce. Developers and marketers are now coming to him for advice on how to better communicate their products, which is awesome! Amazeballs! World-class! (uh, sorry Dan)
How to hack it
You can install your own Dejargonator. Simply add it to your Chrome browser from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unbounces-dejargonator/keboemgfnnjjhjiljgacjbkgophcpkjj
Listen & Subscribe
You can listen to the full story in the Envoy Office Hacks podcast. Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes — just click here and hit ‘subscribe’.