Comments on mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
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mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
I am documenting features on a web site. The audience is end users, who could be anywhere from seasoned Internet veterans to relatively new people who came for my site's content but aren't generally online for hours every day. People visit the web site on a variety of devices, from phones (mobile site, touch) to tablets (desktop site, touch) to traditional computers (desktop site, mouse), and we do not plan to make documentation variants per form factor. (The site itself is responsive and follows mobile and desktop conventions as applicable.)
The documentation style is imperative, not descriptive (for clarity and to follow widespread convention). Sometimes the documentation needs to tell the user to interact with a button or link. Before mobile, we would have said "click". People reading on mobile devices know to mentally translate "click" to "tap" when reading instructions, but it makes me wonder if they are, in the back of their minds, wondering whether mobile is an afterthought for us and what else might be wrong in our documentation, so if I can find a better term I'd like to.
I considered "select", but to experienced techies that means "highlight", not "invoke". I don't know how much I should be concerned about that when writing for a general audience. (Most of my previous work has been for very technical readers and must be precise.)
Is there a general-purpose, concise term that works in imperative voice for "invoke a thing in a UI"?
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Click is really the correct term. I know it is a made-up action description for a mouse or trackball. It requires on-the-fly mental replacement with tap when used with a touch-screen (phone, tablet or larger). But click is the term used, for better or worse, within the code that runs all these wonderful web sites. Specifically, it is the onclick event in all modern browsers. In other places, such as this Windows documentation, the events are "button down" and "button up" but the discussion nearly universally speaks about the "click" actions.
As far as alternatives, select is not a great option (pun intended, of course). The reason is that "select" has not one but two very specific meanings already:
- the HTML select element which contains option elements and is used to select one of many items - for this you can write things like "select a widget from the list"
- selecting (aka highlighting) text on a page (e.g., "Select All") - for this you can write things like "select text in the box that you want to move and click cut"
Using select in a more general sense dilutes the meaning of select in those two primary uses and can both confuse regular users and annoy advanced users (especially programmers).
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