While gathering a list of great online image editors, I stumbled across something unexpected—an easy to read user agreement.
Aviary had updated their terms of use and so I was prompted to accept the revision. As I was scanning the agreement, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had a built-in Legalese-to-English translator. Let me explain.
Legal Summary
Aviary’s Terms of Use page had all the normal legal wording of any other user agreement out there. But off to the right, beside each section or paragraph, there was a brief summary of what was contained in the corresponding section. Better still, the summary sounded like it was written by a human.
Aviary’s Terms of Use includes a summary that is easy to understand.
The thing that amazed me was that I actually read the entire user agreement (the summary, that is). By the time I was done reading, which didn’t take long, I felt like I knew what was going on.
Why Important?
It would be interesting to know exactly how many terms and conditions, user agreements and privacy policies the average person has to accept over the course of their life. But how many have you actually read?
Seeing how much information we hand over to a company in exchange for their products and services, you would think everyone would be reading every single line. But it just isn’t so. The wording and sheer amount of words makes it difficult for even the most diligent person to get past more than a couple paragraphs.
Why Are User Agreements (EULA) So Hard To Read?
Lawyers.
No. Actually, I think the fault lies a bit on both sides—end users (consumers) and companies and their legal departments.
Most people scan. I’m a scanner. My friend’s a scanner, and his wife is as well. Most people get a bit lazy for whatever reason when it comes to reading; especially boring legal documents. There’s just no way to scan and understand most user agreements, so people give up and end up not reading any of it. After a while, they get conditioned so that when they see a EULA, they just click Accept.
On the other hand, you have companies wanting to limit their liability. To an extent that’s certainly understandable. Sometimes though, I think they don’t actually want you to read the entire agreement and so they word things in a way that’s detailed, yet still ambiguous.
You also read reports of companies engaging in some shady practices, but hiding behind their user agreement; saying, “It was in the user agreement! They knew about it.”
Regardless of who shares most of the blame, people really should read EULA’s and privacy policies before accepting them, and websites and companies should make it easier for them to do so.
A Step In the Right Direction
I’m not sure if Aviary is breaking new ground here or not, but I think their take on making legal documents simple to read and understand is a step in the right direction. I would love to see more websites and companies provide human-readable documents.
What do you think? Have you seen other examples of easy to understand user agreements or privacy policies? Drop us a comment.
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