How Users Read on the Web
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.
Scannable Text
People either scan or skip large blocks of web text, so:
- Use fewer words
- About ½ the words of conventional (print) text
- Break up text with pictures or diagrams
- Highlight keywords
- Use bulleted & numbered lists
- Use meaningful headings and subheadings
Limiting Ideas
People won’t make it to the end of long, disorganized pages that force them to scroll endlessly. So:
- Organize your topics
- Use the Inverted Pyramid style of writing
- Limit each page to 1 main topic
- Limit each paragraph to 1 sub-topic
- If there are too many topics or sub-topics, break the page up into multiple pages — 1 big idea per page
Other Reasons to Write & Format for the Web
Two other reasons to follow best-practices for web writing are:
- Accessibility — a properly formatted page is easier to navigate for sight-impaired or physically challenged users
- Search engine rankings — search engines typically use headings to determine the importance of information on a page
Writing for the web isn’t like writing for print, although it shares some similarities with journalistic writing and writing for research papers. Visitors need all the help they can get to find what they’re looking for. Organizing your thoughts, formatting the page and keeping it brief all help users to locate the meaning of the page.
