Usability of content

Here are some essential things to consider when you are working toward optimal usability of content:
The F shaped pattern of reading and scanning. Eye tracking study after eye tracking study shows that the F-shape is consistently the shape of the heat map created by users eying of web pages. Use that F wisely. Revise the way you use that F and review it constantly. Your web site will improve!

You have no more than 20 words to let readers know where they are. Let them know immediately what the page is about and that this is where they want to be. Readers spend less than 5 seconds on any web page, on average. A paper titled Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use published in the February 2008 issue of the academic online journal, Transactions on the Web presented a study of users' reading habits.

Findings of the study showed that a significant percent of pageviews lasted less than 4 seconds. In such brief "visits," users clearly bounced right out without truly "using" the page. In addition, Google acknowledges users' low attention span by considering a 40% bounce rate very acceptable for most sites.

According to Jakob Nielsen, users will likely "read no more than 20% of the text on the average page."

Literacy varies and most users have low literacy. Aside from statistics about the broader population's literacy levels, Web users tend to be young teens, a group that has – on average – lower literacy rates than the average population. As Nielsen says about teens, "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."

Who are your readers? How big is their vocabulary? Will you lose the average web visitors if you use language and diction that are too advanced for them?

Use easy, legible, appealing fonts and colours. This speaks for itself: use the color-wheel wisely.

Passive voice can be better than active. Passive voice can allow you to highlight the things you want to highlight and this in turn can allow you to present your intended subject more quickly to users – and searchers. While this sounds contrary to what they teach in English 101, this is in fact cogently argued for in another commentary by Jakob Nielsen, where he shows how passive voice allows you to foreground keywords users are searching for instead of employing subject first in your sentences.

Don't go on too long. Ideally, no web page should be any more than 400 words. If you go over this, you're likely giving 95% of your readers much more than they really need or want.

Learn more:

• Usability of video & newsletters
• Usability and Content
• Contact Interpix's usability specialists via our contact page.