Design language for the customer

[David]

I came across and interesting example of the use of language targeted at different user profiles today. Compare the text on this page:

http://www.jdsports.co.uk/customer-service/how-to-shop/

with this one:

http://www.bankfashion.co.uk/customer-service/howtoshop/

Notice also the different approaches to the use of the hyphen!

Both brands are owned by the same parent company and both pages are intended to serve the same purpose. So why is the language different?

What struck me is that one site uses words like "motive" and "unique" while the other uses much plainer language. Clearly, the copywriters had a different user in mind for each site.

[tomjeatt]

Very interesting - you can really imagine the voices of the sales assistants:


Like to see the gear you're about to buy from as many angles as possible?
Well we've got thumbnails (small pictures) on everything so that you can see all the detail views you need - simply click the thumbnail and it will appear as the large image. Plus you can zoom in to see even more detail by simply clicking the large image. Zoom in up to four times to really see the detail that makes all the difference!
We know you'd love to touch it and try it on but the internet has a long way to go before we can offer you that! What we can do is let you view each product from different angles and pick out any important details you might want to see. Click on the small photos (thumbnails) of the products to see a bigger view. Want to see more? Click the large image to zoom in up to four times - see even more and drag it around with your mouse to explore the whole product!I would guess that the same copywriter wrote both of these to the same brief, and probably at the same time - there are so many similarities in the copy.

p.s. just out of interest I copied both pages in Word to get the Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics. They both had a very similar reading-ease percentage (Bank 71.6, JD Sports 70.8) but they had significantly different grade levels - Bank 7.5, JD Sports 9.3. Pretty good scores though!