textgoeshere

Two classic columns by Jakob Nielsen are a bit misleading. To be sure, he has had a major positive effect on web design. In fact people still quote advice he gave eight (8!) years ago. It’s not out of date. But out of context, his advice on writing for the web consists of - at best - half-truths. Have another look.

In ‘Be Succinct! (Writing for the Web)‘, Nielsen states:

The three main guidelines for writing for the Web are:

• Be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication
• Write for scannability: don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text
• Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages

Let’s look at each one in turn.

50% less text is only half right

This is just the wrong thing to measure. Yes, it is essential to be concise. But if you can use 50% fewer words online, why not do that in print as well? And how would you know how many words you would use in print anyway?

So how should you check whether your writing is succinct enough? It’s an iterative process. Read what you have written. Ask yourself, can I remove words and still say what I want to say

• unambiguously?
• compellingly?
• in a way that my audience wants it?
• at the right cost?

If not, then you’re done.

Scanning gets only half the story

Nielsen says “John Morkes and I found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word” ( ‘Reading on the Web‘ , emphasis mine).

Yes, it is essential to write for skim-reading. You can write so that readers will get something from your page even if they don’t read it all word-by-word. But readers with a particular interest will read every word.

Before you split the page, read to the bottom of this one

I think some people got the wrong end of the stick here. Maybe it went like this:

• Nielsen says split stuff up.
• Nielsen says people don’t like scrolling.
• So we should split up long pages.

Neilsen does not mean that you should split up pages if they are long. He says information. Large bodies of information should be organised into discrete chunks. Later on the same page, he says:

Hypertext should not be used to segment a long linear story into multiple pages: having to download several segments slows down reading and makes printing more difficult.

(The irony is that some people didn’t scroll to the end or read what he had to say word-by-word.)

So how do you decide what goes on a single page? I’ll try and answer that question in another post.

(Update: Nielsen and the F-pattern)