Microsoft’s Much More Readable Terms of Service Agreement

Admit it, you’ve never actually read an end user license agreement before. It’s much more convenient to simply click ‘accept’ and move on with your life than to read pages and pages of legal jargon. Even after South Park poked fun at the issue, which would really force anyone to start reading the agreements, I still don’t read them.

Microsoft has taken the initiative to make their terms of service a lot more readable. Although the agreement is just as long as any other agreement, the new Q&A format highlights questions that many users would have and answers them right there in the terms, which is much more inviting than a block of text in the same type face.

The agreement is sectioned off in 24 different sections that are further broken down into various related agreements. In addition to the sectioned agreement, the use of bold face type and capital letters to highlight very important terms, including the notice telling users to read the arbitration clause and class action waiver in the top, allows users who just want to skim the agreement to read the most necessary terms that can affect their rights is a dispute arises with Microsoft.

Hopefully this new formatting will inspire other companies to follow suit. If more agreements are this user friendly, I’m sure the norm will shift from users simply clicking agree at the end to users actually taking the time to read all the terms.

Would you start reading terms if they were organized like this? Tell us your thoughts below!