Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Simplifying the Terms of Service

At the GDISF study group last night, one of the attendees was working on the Terms of Service for a new site, and she wanted to give the users a way to see the layman-friendly version of the terms. She was inspired by the "Simply Put" right hand side of the Pinterest site, and was experimenting with other ways to present that.

Pinterest:

I'd never seen that sort of thing before, and I think it's pretty neat, so I asked on Twitter for more examples. Here are a few they shared:

500px:

CodePen.io:

Aviary:


Related to this, there's the Terms of Service; Didn't Read initiative that comes up with layman-friendly version of the top TOSes, and there's a list of related efforts to simplify terms and identify ambigious terms from CommonTerms.

How do you make your Terms of Service layman-friendly? Tell me in the comments!