webwriting
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Writing for the Web
Teenagers on the Web : poor reading skills and low patience levels mean that text has to be ultra-concise for teens and that more information must be communicated in images Intranet usability , including guidelines for intranet content, news on intranets, HR manuals, and how to present information about projects, teams, and individuals on intranets Full paper documenting the original research from 1997 (long): Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web (unfortunately this paper was written for print and not online)
Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages
Web users generally prefer writing that is concise, easy to scan, and objective (rather than promotional) in style. We incorporated these and other attributes into a redesign of Web content. Doing so required trade-offs and some hard decisions, but the results were positive. The rewritten website scored 159% higher than the original in measured usability. Compared with original-site users, users of the rewritten site reported higher subjective satisfaction and performed better in terms of task time, task errors, and memory.It's hard enough to write for the Web and meet the guidelines for concise, scannable, and objective content. It's even harder to write Web headlines, which must be: predictable , so users know whether they'll like the full article before they click (because people don't return to sites that promise more than they deliver). For several years, I've been very impressed with BBC News headlines, both on the main BBC homepage and on its dedicated news page .
World's Best Headlines: BBC News (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view. We've known since 1997 how most users read on the Web : they scan text and pick out the pieces that interest them. Content usability guidelines have remained mostly the same since 1997, but now there's news. We recently expanded our research to cover a big part of the population left out of earlier studies: lower-literacy users. As it turns out, their online behavior is radically different than that of higher-literacy users. This new research on lower-literacy usability is sponsored by Pfizer, which has a major effort underway to make its consumer communications understandable and actionable by a broad consumer audience.
Low-Literacy Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox for October 1, 1997 They don't . People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page , picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)
