On bureaucratic language, legalese and jargon in interfaces – and why being incomprehensible doesn't protect you legally, it voids your clauses.
The short version: Around 20 percent of adults in Germany sit at the lowest level of reading proficiency — roughly 10.6 million people. Jargon in applications, contracts and interfaces is still the norm. The standard counter-argument ("it has to be worded that way legally") fails in both directions: a 2023 MIT study shows that even lawyers understand and remember legalese worse than plain language — and § 307(1) sentence 2 of the German Civil Code makes incomprehensible terms and conditions void. Incomprehensibility isn't a shield. It's a liability.
A sentence of the kind that appears on German screens millions of times a day:
"Final processing of your request is currently not possible, as the required documentation is not available in full."
What the user wants to know: what's missing, what do I do, how long will it take.
What the sentence delivers: none of that.
You could also write:
"We're still missing your proof of income. Upload it and we'll be done in about three working days."
Same information. Same legal effect. A fraction of the effort for the reader.
And now the surprising part: the second version isn't the riskier one. It's the safer one.
1. Who You're Actually Writing For
Let's start with the audience, because it's systematically misjudged in this area.
The 2023 PIAAC survey, analysed by Anke Grotlüschen's team at the University of Hamburg, puts around 20 percent of adults in Germany aged 16 to 65 at the lowest competence level in reading — roughly 10.6 million people. The earlier LEO study arrived at 6.2 million adults with low literacy in 2018, using a different measurement concept. The figures aren't directly comparable, and that should be said. Overview of LEO PIAAC 2023.
But whichever number you take: we're talking about millions of adults who sign contracts, submit applications, hold insurance policies and run bank accounts — and who come unstuck on a nested sentence with three nominalisations.
Add everyone else: people whose first language isn't German. People under time pressure. People filling in the form on a phone on the train. People with reading or attention impairments. And people who simply can't be bothered to read a sentence three times — probably the largest group of all.
So writing in jargon isn't writing for "the general public minus a few exceptions." It's writing for a minority and excluding everyone else from your own service.
2. The Myth That Jargon Is More Precise
The standard argument runs: it has to be worded that way, or it stops being legally correct.
That's become difficult to sustain empirically.
Even lawyers understand legalese worse. A study by Eric Martínez and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, presented 105 US attorneys with contract passages in two versions: classic legalese and plain language. The lawyers did better overall than laypeople — but they too understood and recalled the legalese versions less well. A further group of attorneys additionally rated the plain-language versions as higher quality, as more likely to be signed, and as no less enforceable. Summary in Scientific American.
And everyone prefers plain language, the educated most of all. Christopher Trudeau surveyed around 376 people about legal communication for his 2012 study The Public Speaks. Result: about 80 percent prefer clear language — and, contrary to expectation, that preference rose with level of education rather than falling. Comparable surveys among judges land at similarly high figures. Study at SSRN.
That clears away two excuses at once. Jargon is neither more precise nor a concession to a sophisticated readership. It's a convention nobody likes and everybody passes on.
3. And Now the Argument That Turns Legal Around
This is where it gets interesting for decision-makers, because the usual defensive line — "incomprehensible but legally watertight" — is exactly backwards in Germany.
Section 307(1) sentence 2 of the German Civil Code contains the transparency requirement: an unreasonable disadvantage may also arise from the fact that a provision is not clear and comprehensible. The consequence isn't a reprimand. It's the invalidity of the clause. Legal text.
In settled case law, the Federal Court of Justice requires that rights and obligations be presented transparently, correctly, definitely and as clearly as possible — and that economic disadvantages and burdens be recognisable. The transparency requirement doesn't apply to consumers alone; the principles developed around it are also applied between businesses.
Translated for your next meeting: the incomprehensible clause doesn't protect you. It falls away. And then, instead of your carefully negotiated arrangement, the default statutory position simply applies.
Two further obligations point the same way:
- Article 12 GDPR requires information "in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language."
- The BFSG, Germany's Accessibility Strengthening Act, in force since June 2025, points via EN 301 549 to the WCAG. Comprehensible labels, comprehensible error messages and comprehensible instructions aren't a question of style there, they're checkpoints.
A note: I'm a designer, not a lawyer. Someone else does the case-by-case review. What I can assess is whether a sentence gets understood — and that can be tested rather than debated.
4. Why It Stays This Way Anyway
If the arguments are that clear, why does every insurance application still look like 1974?
Because the causes aren't linguistic, they're organisational. Four patterns I see in almost every regulated project:
Copy-paste from the statute. The legal text moves unchanged into the interface. It's convenient and it feels safe. Except the statute addresses legal practitioners, not customers. A paragraph of law isn't user copy, it's the source you write user copy from.
The approval chain only runs one way. Legal can delete and add. But nobody has a mandate to demand comprehensibility. So every text grows with each round — and never shrinks.
Liability fear with no counterweight. Making a sentence more complicated carries no risk. Simplifying it means having to justify yourself. Under that asymmetry no text can improve.
Jargon as a status signal. Nobody says this out loud, but it's there. Complicated language signals competence, seriousness, importance. Especially in sectors where the product itself is invisible — finance, insurance, public administration — the language is often the only thing that looks like substance.
That last pattern is the most persistent, because nobody admits to it. It helps to name it: if your product only seems serious as long as it stays incomprehensible, you have a problem that isn't a copy problem.
5. Finance and Other Regulated Sectors: Mandatory Information Isn't Filing
In regulated industries there's an additional mechanism, and it's a particularly treacherous one: the legislature requires that information be given — and companies treat that as a filing obligation rather than a communication task.
The key information document, the product information sheet, the cost disclosure, the policy conditions, the pre-contractual information: all documents whose stated purpose is to let consumers make an informed decision. And all documents designed in practice so that precisely this doesn't happen — a PDF in the attachment, 8 point type, no structure, no examples, no numbers anyone can relate to their own situation.
The point I most often leave with people responsible in this field: regulation very rarely requires you to be incomprehensible. Usually it requires the opposite, and only prescribes content, sequence and scope. The rest — language, typography, examples, explanatory structure — is your room to manoeuvre. You just don't use it, because nobody ever named it as room to manoeuvre.
And the effect is measurable where it hurts: people who don't understand what they're signing up for abandon, call, cancel later or withdraw. In regulated flows, incomprehensibility produces exactly the same costs as bad forms — just spread across more departments, so nobody notices.
6. Where Bureaucratic Language Actually Shows Up in the Interface
Not in the terms and conditions. Everyone expects it there. In the operation of the product:
Labels. "Identity verification" instead of "check your ID." "Premium payer" instead of "who pays?"
Buttons. "Submit application" is fine. "Complete process" isn't, because the user doesn't know whether anything happens afterwards.
Status labels. "In progress," "under review," "subject to confirmation" — system states passed straight through from back-office processing into a customer interface. "We're waiting on your bank" says the same thing and answers the actual question as well.
Error messages. See the piece on error states: "The input does not conform to the format requirements" versus "The IBAN has 22 characters, yours has 20."
Letters and emails. The classic is the premium increase. "Effective 1 July, an adjustment of premiums will be made pursuant to § 8 of the policy conditions" versus "From 1 July you'll pay €4.20 more a month, so €58.90 instead of €54.70." Both sentences are correct. Only one answers the question the recipient actually has.
The pattern is always the same: jargon describes the transaction from the system's point of view. The user wants it from theirs.
7. The Solution Legal Will Agree To
The most common mistake in simplifying is trying to replace the legal text. That starts a fight you won't win — and don't need to.
The solution is layering: plain language on top, legal text beneath. Both are there, both apply, but the order is right.
In practice that means:
- A summary in everyday language, right at the decision point. What happens, what it costs, what it means for me.
- The full legal text, expandable or linked, unchanged.
- A worked example with numbers. Nothing explains a cost clause like a calculated case.
- Definitions in context, not in a glossary at the end. Someone stumbling over "excess" wants it explained where it appears.
The argument that wins legal over, incidentally, isn't "comprehensibility is nice." It's § 307 from section 3: the summary increases the chance the clause survives at all.
And one distinction that often gets muddled: Leichte Sprache (Easy Language) is a separate, strictly regulated concept with fixed rules, aimed primarily at people with cognitive impairments. Einfache Sprache (Plain Language) is less formalised and means comprehensible standard German. For most products, plain language is the right benchmark — and that bar is higher than most people think.
8. The Business Case
As in the other parts of this series, the version that gets it approved:
Direct: every incomprehensible passage generates enquiries. Take your ten most common support contact reasons and mark the ones where somebody calls because they didn't understand a text. Multiply by your cost per contact. That number is the price of your writing style, and it recurs every year.
Indirect: abandonment in application flows, incomplete document submissions, rework in back-office processing, withdrawals and cancellations from customers who only understood afterwards what they'd signed.
And the risk: a struck-down clause doesn't cost you the clause, it costs you the arrangement behind it — potentially across every contract containing it.
Against that stands a copy project. A few weeks. One person who can write, working with someone who knows the subject matter, plus review by legal. That isn't a transformation. That's a sprint.
9. What You Can Actually Do
1. Read your texts out loud. In the meeting where you approve them. The test is remarkably brutal and takes ten minutes.
2. Find the ten most important sentences. Not every text at once. The sentences every customer sees: completion, rejection, status update, cost notice, cancellation.
3. Write before-and-after pairs. Nothing convinces decision-makers faster than two sentences side by side that mean the same thing.
4. Test with five people who don't work for you. Don't ask whether they understood it — ask what they would do now. That's the only honest test.
5. Build the layered structure. Plain language on top, legal text beneath, worked example alongside.
6. Give someone the mandate. Who is allowed to shorten sentences? As long as the answer is "nobody," nothing changes.
Why You Can Take My Word for It
I'm Tobias Adam, a freelance UX designer in Hamburg, more than ten years in digital product development.
I learned the craft agency-side, including at Jung von Matt and deepblue networks. I've worked for BMW, Audi, FIFA, Union Investment, Vodafone, OBI and Deutsche Messe, among others. Over 20 awards, including Webby, ADC and Cannes.
Regulated flows are where this topic shows itself most clearly. In the VisualVest account opening in the Union Investment orbit, for instance, mandatory disclosures, risk information and identity verification all converge — content that is prescribed and still has to be understood, because at the end of it somebody invests money. That's exactly where you find out whether regulation is really the reason for incomprehensibility, or just the most convenient one. In my experience it's usually the most convenient one.
Today I work freelance and together with HC Merkle as intro.team — two freelancers for the phase where an idea becomes a testable product: concept, UX, UI, prototype, user testing. Short cycles, senior staffing, no agency apparatus.
The Short Version
- Around 20 percent of adults in Germany sit at the lowest level of reading proficiency. You're writing for them too.
- Jargon isn't more precise. Even lawyers understand and recall legalese worse.
- Everyone prefers plain language — and the preference rises with education, it doesn't fall.
- Incomprehensibility doesn't protect you. Under § 307(1) sentence 2 the clause falls away.
- The problem is organisational, not linguistic. Legal can add, nobody can cut.
- Regulation rarely requires you to be incomprehensible. It usually requires the opposite.
- System language isn't customer language. "Under review" versus "we're waiting on your bank."
- Layer, don't replace: plain language on top, legal text beneath, a worked example alongside.
- Test for action, not comprehension. Not "did you understand?" but "what would you do now?"
- Read the sentences out loud. The cheapest test there is.
A text nobody understands hasn't informed anyone. It has only documented that you could have.
Previously in this series: forms, field count and smart defaults — B2B software and internal tools — error states — the last mile — cancellation flows.
Sources and Further Reading
- LEO PIAAC 2023, University of Hamburg (Grotlüschen et al.): low literacy in the German-speaking world – leo.blogs.uni-hamburg.de
- Martínez, Mollica & Gibson: Even lawyers do not like legalese, PNAS 2023 – summary at scientificamerican.com
- Christopher R. Trudeau: The Public Speaks: An Empirical Study of Legal Communication (2012) – papers.ssrn.com
- Section 307 of the German Civil Code (BGB), content review and transparency requirement – gesetze-im-internet.de
- Article 12 GDPR, transparent information and communication – dsgvo-gesetz.de
- Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG), in force since 28 June 2025 – bfsg-gesetz.de