Design texts for monitor display

Use columns or other ways of narrowing the text block on the screen, margins, type fonts, colors, size, and leading to give the effect you want.

Writers must make online text more rewarding to read than paper text: they should use the devices of popup windows for footnotes, secondary windows, charts, and illustrations. They should use hypertext links to tie in other, related online texts and images, even at the cost of potentially losing a reader to the other text. This is the way to take advantage of the medium.
George Dillon Content, Structure, Webbiness: Elements of a Rhetoric of HTML

Write FOR your reader

General preference for informal or conversational writing (and humour used with discretion). Jargon, high-falutin' rhetoric, marketese and academic blather are all generally disliked (golly, surprise me some more.)

Perceived credibility is important: there has been so much hype about the lack of gatekeepers (such as publishers etc.) to ensure the authority of online texts that users respond to conventionalised notions of 'quality' (as expressed through design, language etc.) as representing credibility.

 

 

'Non-linear' media require strong structures and content narratives How many non-fiction reference books have you ever read straight through from cover to cover? There's nothing unique about the Ònon-linear" way we use Web pages; readers have bounced from one content point to another in reference documents since the dawn of writing. The fact that we typically use reference material in non-linear patterns of search-and-retrieval or browsing does not relieve authors of the need to structure documents in carefully organized narratives. In fact, readers depend on the presence of conventional 'linear' document forms to provide the cues they need to home in on the exact content that interests them. Hypertext links only automate and speed up the process of moving from one point to another. Links do not create content, and are no substitute for logical narrative structure.
Lynch, Patrick, 'Visual Logic: Ten fundamentals of Web design'

Mark Bernstein's Tips

• write for a reason
• write often
• write tight
• make good friends
• make good enemies
• let the story unfold
• stand up, speak out
• be sexy
• use your archives
• relax

Mark Bernstein, '10 Tips: Writing for the web'

Write well

Conventional 'good writing' guidelines apply online. They include:

• carefully organizing the information,
• using words and categories that make sense to the audience,
• using topic sentences,
• limiting each paragraph to one main idea,
• and providing the right amount of information.

For more about conventionally structuring writing see:

David Siegal, 'The Nine-act structure: A story-structure class for writers and film buffs'

In a single-goal plot, the protagonist has one problem to solve from the point of commitment to the end of the film. Since single-goal plots are more predictable and tend to drag in the middle, linear-story films are a bad investment. Yet studios continue to make a small number of single-goal films each year. In contrast, most films we see these days have a two-goal plot. This involves the protagonist striving for the false goal, then learning something that changes the whole situation and going for the real goal to save the day in the end. The reversal of the protagonist's goal takes the entire story in a legitimate new direction half-way through the film. This approach gives writers a new way to think about their stories. Most screenwriters can write an exciting first 30 pages and a great ending, but the trick is to keep the reader riveted during the middle 60 pages. The reversal does just that. Without it, your audience may find itself wondering how long until it's over.

Also see Donald Kunze's seven universal strategies for making and structuring art works >>

Write for scanning

Web readers tend to scan: Highlight important points (e.g. headings, design emphasis), and use bullet-point lists to summaries.

Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability.
Morkes, John and Jakob Nielsen, 'Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web'

 

Summaries and reverse-pyramid structures

Web writing that presents summaries, and conclusions up front (inverted pyramid structures) are perceived as useful and time saving. Users who are interested can then choose if they want to continue reading to get background information and in-depth details.

To scroll or not to scroll...

for...

Matterform Media:

Keep your pages small. This is only common courtesy. No one wants to scroll through a gigantic page. A little scrolling is an unfortunate and occasional necessity. A lot of scrolling is pure thoughtlessness. Particularly abhorred is the custom of creating links that scroll you to a far-away point down on the same page. Why not break that monster up into a number of smaller pages? It's really not that much work and your users will appreciate it.

• David Kleinberg --ÊBuild deep sites and short pages
• Dan Shafer -- Keep pages short and focused

  Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, infinite page, use hypertext to structure the content space into a starting page that provides an overview and several secondary pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to allow users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don't concern them.
  Jakob Nielsen, 'Ten Good Deeds in Web Design'

against...

Long Topics Are Easier to Skim, Print, and Do a 'Find' Within: The connect-time to retrieve a page is a significant cognitive overhead. I sent an email to the encyclopedia on CompuServe explaining that they must not break each subsection of an encyclopedia entry into a separate-loading page, because it takes longer to retrieve the page than it does to read it! I can't comprehend an article when I have to stop, click, and wait, just to read the next couple paragraphs. They were breaking the articles into tiny fragments of 2 or 3 paragraphs! It takes me longer to retrieve 2 paragraphs than it does to read it, so this insanely granular hypertext chunking made me take 2 or 3 times as long to read articles...

Michael Hoffman, 'Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation in Your Web or Document

Short pages have the following drawbacks:

• You can't print a set of pages easily.
• Find becomes less useful, because the scope of 'Find' is limited to the current HTML page only.
• You can't skim easily.
• You have to spend more time navigating than reading.
• You can't view related sections contiguously and handle them as a single entity."

Design text and graphic to complement each other

This includes captioning graphics to indicate relevance to the text, avoiding large-file graphics which slow download, and using too many graphics or graphics for decorative effect.

80/20 Rule

20% of the information will, satisfy 80% of your users. Concentrate on providing the most important information.

Don't get caught up in providing all available information: Focus your efforts on providing better access to the best stuff. Hide or just plain get rid of the rest. Don't bother manually assigning metadata to low-priority content; using an automated tool, like a search engine, is fine for users and less work for you. Consider creating a content-development policy that will determine what content to make available, when to revisit and update it, and what to throw out. Our most sophisticated clients spend more time trying to get rid of content than adding it.
Rosenfeld, Louis, Special Report: Design Usability Seven Pitfalls to Avoid in Information Architecture' 2000

**Remember that most people have trouble remembering or even conceptualising more than 7 options at a time.

 

Surely a simple, transparent, efficient transaction cannot be the web's highest aspiration. Simply serving the reader's explicit needs will not and cannot create a memorable experience. If everything goes as expected -- neither better nor worse than usua -- our reader (or our customer) has no reason to remember the experience, or us. ...To offer memorable service -- whether we're giving away ideas or selling products --we need to create a story, an experience, a dramatic arc.
Beyond Useability and Design: The narrative web, Mark Bernstein

 

Julie Hayden, 'Language: the Ultimate User Interface'

Mark Bernstein, '10 Tips: Writing for the web'

Jeffrey Zeldman, 'The Art of Naming'