When tech jargon leaves customers behind
On 20th October, Amazon Web Services was interrupted for a little over a day. Banks like Lloyds and Halifax suffered outages, messaging services like Snapchat went down, and even the UK government's HMRC website was unavailable at times.
But the real issue wasn't the outage itself – it was how it was communicated.
Reports were full of poorly defined numbers juxtaposed with unfamiliar jargon. What did "6,925 Downdetector outage reports at Lloyds at 9.31am" actually mean? Amazon's own report opened with a collection of times and dates, interspersed with unfamiliar product names like "Amazon DynamoDB" and technical jargon like "API error rates."
This kind of communication style speaks to a wider issue in the tech sector as a whole; its relationship with jargon and numbers.
The everyday impact
This isn't just about outage reports. It's in product communications too.
The processors in the laptops we all use are obscured by numerical product names and unfamiliar statistics. The "AMD EPYC 9965 ‘Turin’" boasts a "maximum boost clock of up to 3.7 GHz" - a fact that may mean something to someone technically literate but leaves the average consumer in the dark.
The largest consumer hard drive currently available is the "Solidigm D5-P5336" with "122.88 terabytes" of storage. But what exactly is a terabyte? What does that mean for my hard drive? How much storage do I need to avoid running out? What clock speed is fast enough to run the programs I want to run?
These are the questions consumers are actually asking. And too often, tech companies aren't answering them.
Why it matters
When customers don't understand the numbers, they can't make informed choices. They might overpay for specs they don't need or buy something that won't do what they want it to. They waste time trying to decode technical specifications when they could be comparing what actually matters to them.
For businesses, unclear communication means customers asking basic questions that could have been answered upfront, or worse – choosing a competitor who explains things more clearly.
What clearer communication looks like
Start by asking: what are you actually trying to communicate?
When you're telling someone about "the number of gigabytes in a hard drive," you're really trying to tell them how much space they have to fit the files and folders they use. One terabyte is 1000GB – enough storage to save more than 700 copies of the film Titanic. That means the "Solidigm D5-P5336" could store close to one hundred thousand copies.
A processor's "max clock speed" is essentially just how fast it can run. To run Adobe Premiere Pro, one of the most popular pieces of video editing software, you need a processor that can run at 3.5 GHz. The "AMD EPYC" processor could handle that easily – so why not say so on the page where you're selling it?
These are the same figures tech companies use already, but with context about what they actually mean to the customer, they go from meaningless jargon to useful information.
Moving forward
Numbers in tech are essential, and it's never going to be as simple as just getting rid of them. But they need explaining.
By giving customers something familiar to relate technical specifications to and showing them what those numbers mean for what they want to do, tech companies can help people make better decisions – and better sell their products at the same time.