IMHO
February 9, 1998
John Swenson
MSDN Online
If you've ever written an article for a Web site, or if you plan to write one someday, then Jakob Nielsen has a message for you. The Web usability specialist—a distinguished scientist at Sun Microsystems who has written several books on usability—is an expert on how people read and view information on the Web. He argues that almost no one actually reads on the Web. According to his research, practically everyone just scans information on the Web. If true, this has major implications for how Web sites should be designed and articles structured. Most Web sites today present information terribly, he says.
Nielsen visited Microsoft recently as a guest of Microsoft Research. While he was in Redmond, he delivered a lecture to Microsoft employees, advising them how to make their Web sites more usable and articles more readable. His messages hit home with MSDN Online Editor Norvin Leach and myself, since we've been thinking hard lately about how we structure articles and other information on the MSDN Web site.
Before you stop reading at this point and say, "I'm a software developer, not a writer or site builder, I don't need to know how to publish information on the Web," consider this. Sooner or later, almost every developer has to write a technical article or describe an application they built. Chances are that information will be posted on an internal or external Web site. If you want people to actually read what you write, pay attention to what Nielsen has to day.
According to Nielsen, any article written for the Web should differ in several important ways from an article on the same topic written for print (paper). To begin with, Web articles should only be about half the length of print articles. In his research, Nielsen has found that people have a much shorter attention span on the Web than when they are reading something on paper.
The main reason for this short attention span is because it's so easy to shoot off to a different Web site with a simple mouse click, Nielsen says. Web users always carry this thought in the back of their minds, knowing there are countless other Web sites they could jump to at any moment. Ever noticed how many people read Web sites with their finger poised over the mouse button? A physical piece of reading material like a magazine or paper report tends to hold a person's attention better because the user has to move the magazine or paper away from their face and pick up something else when they want to switch what they're reading.
If you really want people to absorb the information you post on the Web, it's essential to teach yourself to write in a new way, according to Nielsen. "The natural way you write is wrong," he says.
Since most people have spent years writing for print, they find it hard to break old habits. But Nielsen argues that change is essential when switching to writing for the Web. Everything written for the Web should be extremely concise, presented in outline format, and stripped of all marketing verbiage, he advises.
To demonstrate what he means, I'll switch to a writing style Nielsen recommends as I list some of his other tips for creating Web sites and articles that people will actually read:
Use highlighted words, limit your paragraphs to a single thought, and put everything into bullets and lists.
Devote more of your Web site to the actual articles and other content you want to publish, and less space to navigational menus, ads, and graphics. Many sites use only 20 percent of the pixels on each screen to display actual site content, he says.
Research has shown that people judge information to be more credible on Web sites that look like they are professionally designed. It also boosts credibility to carefully edit out all typographical errors and frequently update information on your site, since most people find fresh information more credible. Adding links to other Web sites helps credibility, too, since it makes your site appear more connected to the rest of the Web.
Web users dislike gratuitous, self-inflating, marketing information. "They really want the hard facts," Nielsen says. "They don't want self-promoting information. Yet if you look around the Web, this is how all sites seem to be done." If you strip out the marketing talk, people won't have to do that editing in their own heads and they'll be more likely to keep reading.
When writing for the Web, always write in an inverted pyramid style. Put your conclusion at the top and list the most important information first, assuming that most people will quit reading before they reach the end.
Since it's important to be concise, use hyperlinks to shorten your text. Rather than explain every nonessential thought to your readers, fill your text with hyperlinks to sidebars, related articles, and other sites where readers who are interested can get more information. Hyperlinks are a particularly useful way to shorten white papers and other long technical articles. To see how Nielsen uses hyperlinks in his articles, see his essay about Writing for the Web (http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/).
Since download times rule the Web, don't make your readers wait for graphics and big pages to download. Most people start feeling anxious if they have to wait more than one second for a page to appear, Nielsen says, and most won't wait more than 10 seconds unless the information is very important to them. A detailed explanation of Nielsen's research on this topic is available at his Web site (http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html).
Always remember that what really matters is not giving your Web readers more information, but giving them more concise information. How much is too much? It varies depending on subject, but as a general guideline, you shouldn't make readers click down more than three screens to reach the end of any article, Nielsen cautions.
For more advice from Nielsen and details of his usability research, visit useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website (http://www.useit.com/).
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