Have you read the Terms and Conditions lately?

Shopping in the real world has always been fairly simple; find the item you want, exchange it for some fancy paper and enjoy. But when the purchasing process moved from the real world to the Internet something odd occurred. A process that was intended to be easier and less time consuming became much more complicated when some bright spark decided the process was better with the inclusion of Terms and Conditions.

Seemingly accepted as the norm today we are apparently expected to read and agree to the most tedious and illegible pieces of content a website will ever produce. Yet when shopping in the supermarket the process isn’t complicated by the cashier asking you to read the Klingon version of War and Peace prior to being allowed to pay for your groceries. So why is this ok on the Internet?

Thankfully many websites now imply an acceptance of Terms and Conditions through the purchasing process but this doesn’t stop it still being an unusual necessity and something that is probably completely nonsensical for the vast majority of the population.

Yet in not reading the Terms and Conditions on a website and blindly accepting them could we have actually done something so stupid as to sell out souls numerous times to the large corporations of the world?

In Web Design circles there is always talk about usability and accessibility where both address the ease of use of a website by the widest possible audience. But Terms and Conditions pages seem so often forgotten about and ignored as an unnecessary burden and one where us as designers cannot have any impact due to the legally sensitive nature of what is contained within these pages.

That’s why it’s great to see a website like 500px try to buck this trend and present a Terms and Conditions page that as well as including all the legal speak also adds brief explanations of each section in words the non-lawyers of us out there can understand.

As an example they cover the possibility of account termination which clocks up 116 words in legal speak but only 22 in a short and concise explanation. The result is a Terms and Conditions page that a wider group will understand and allows a person to know exactly what they’re signing up for in far less time.

The short explanations also invite the user to read the more detailed points that apply most directly to them. If a person is looking for the cancellation information they can quickly find this, and understand the legal speak better as the short explanation primes them to what the detailed stuff states.

If Terms and Conditions really are required as part of your website then the 500px example is as near perfect an implementation as we have come across and certainly should act as an example for all other websites to follow. It may seem like a small addition but if the Terms and Conditions are an important part of the process then it’s about time they become usable and legible for the average person not just lawyers.