Grammar

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Acronyms and abbreviations

Acronyms are like inside jokes. If you aren’t in the know they don’t make sense. Use acronyms to save space, but not at the risk of confusing people. Spell out an acronym on first use and include it in parentheses. ​

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between you and your customers.

Bold and italics

Use bold to refer to UI elements. Avoid italics or quotation marks. Using bold is a bold statement. A little bit goes a long way, so use bold sparingly. Don’t get too bold in notifications. Only use bold for headings, and not in the description.

Capitalization

Follow standard capitalization rules for English. Capitalize names of people, companies, and product features and use lowercase for just about everything else. At Zendesk, we use sentence case for headings, subheadings, and buttons.

Contractions

Contractions are A-OK. They make sentences shorter and easier to read. Avoid them in flows that feel formal like billing, security settings, or account recovery.

Date and time

Use unicode standards for date and time. Refer to your location-specific standards on CLDR. Zendesk uses relative time to show elapsed time. Avoid vague terms like “now,” “soon,” “later,” or“in a while.”

When the event happened	Example
Less than a minute ago today.	< 1 minute ago
More than a minute and less than an hour ago today.	43 minutes ago 43 min ago
More than an hour ago today.	Today at {time}
On the previous calendar date.	Yesterday at {time}
Before yesterday and in the current calendar year.	{date} at {time}
Any time before the current year.	{date} at {time}

Emoji

Save it for Slack. Emoji are rarely used in the UI. Some emojis have double meanings and don’t localize. 👎 😞

Numbers and currency

Use unicode standards for numbers and currency. Refer to your location-specific standards on CLDR. Zendesk uses numerals (rather than words) in the UI. Recast descriptions to avoid starting a sentence with a number.

Pronouns

Using Zendesk is a gender-neutral experience. Instead of gendered pronouns, rewrite using second person (“you”), or “they” and “their.”​

You

Address a single person in a specific context, rather than all people. UX is a conversation, not a speech.

Me

Don’t put words in our users’ mouths. They can speak for themselves. Avoid using my, us, and mine.

We

Frame experiences around the user. Only use “we” when a specific group of humans are the authors of a message, for example, “We’re the UX Research team and we want your feedback.”

Singular and plural

Use singular to represent a quantity of one and plural for two or more things. Avoid parentheses to display both cases at once.

Tense

The present tense is what’s happening now. It’s friendlier and easier to read. Stick to one tense per component. Don’t move from past to present tense—we’re not time travelers.