Links that follow up on the user’s current interest encourage site exploration and reduce bounce rates. With the proper invitation, people will stay longer on your site.
Format-based navigation, such as links to Videos, at the top levels of a website’s information architecture lacks sufficient context and information scent for topic-focused users.
Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.
To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.
Usability studies of corporate content distributed through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn: users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.
Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy's costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.
Unless you have explicit links to product pages from article content, users who visit articles directly from search engines might never realize that you sell related products.
Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.
Even small holiday decorations can increase joy of use and make websites feel more current and more connected to users' lives and physical environment. The key is to commemorate without detracting from your users' main reasons for visiting the site.
To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.
Most streaming video is useless; instead use higher-quality downloadable clips and short segments that can be chosen from a menu. All multimedia needs plain-page previews.
Web services often collect content from separate sources and present it to users in a single interface. Making such integration usable requires unified meta-content.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.
Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.
Many best practices for high-quality content creation and management will inevitably be skipped over, unless they are explicitly planned for as user stories within any Agile development project.
Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.
Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Before you write any content for the web, you should clearly define who will read it, what the reader’s goals are, and what impact you want your content to have on the reader.
Top Tasks are a tool used to focus a design team on the same, best set of user tasks. It comprises a list of 10 or fewer activities that users should be able to achieve using a design. If people can’t do these things, the design has failed. It takes a small amount of effort to create Top Tasks lists, but their impact is great.
The words in your interface can help establish your product’s personality. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
4 guidelines for writing the link texts on websites to ensure users click the right options. Links should be Specific, Sincere, Substantial, and Succinct.
Images are content, and different types of images serve different purposes. Decorative images have a role in establishing tone and emotional appeal, but they must not interfere with a user’s ability to accomplish a task.
The language of your product is important when communicating with a global audience. Translation and localization are two different levels of adaptation.
Content frames are a tool that can help us make sure we’re not waiting until the end of the design process to incorporate real content into the experience.
Users expect that the content they see will be relevant to their individual needs. Personalization and customization are techniques that can help you ensure that users see what matters to them.
In our usability study with domain experts, we discovered that even highly educated readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan, just like everyone else.
Catherine Toole (@catherinetoole) the founder of digital content agency Sticky Content, explains the importance of building mutually supportive relationships with your stakeholders.
Content strategy addresses high-level goals, not just tactical implementation, according to Catherine Toole (@catherinetoole), founder of digital content agency Sticky Content.
A content inventory and audit are two important activities to complete before developing a strategy to improve your digital content. Conduct them together to set your content up for success.
Interviews with intranet designers show that intranets are responding to COVID-19 with frequent updates, information about staying healthy, and tools to aid virtual work.
Many websites fail to provide the right information for research-based tasks, requiring unnecessary effort for users to piece together various information sources manually.
Even a talking-head video can keep people engaged. Take advantage of residual fixations upon scene changes; vary the facial expression, subject position, and even camera angle to reawaken the user’s attention.
While jump links have caused problems in the past, they can successfully be used to move users down long pages and directly to content, on any screen size.
These tips for writing web content for specialized audiences will help you sound authoritative and bolster your credibility. Professionals want content that is easy to scan, factual, and verifiable.
Readers can understand short, simple text content on mobile devices just as well as on computers, but they slow down when reading difficult text on mobile.
A large-scale usability study revealed the most common and damaging web-design mistakes of today. They aren't surprising or new - they're enduring issues that continue to hurt website usability.
International B2B sites should demonstrate regional presence, adapt to local conventions, and ensure that localized sites are consistent with a main site.
A two-part experiment found that different tones of voice have measurable impacts on users’ perceptions of a brand’s friendliness, trustworthiness, and desirability. Casual, conversational, and enthusiastic tones performed best.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Designers must aim to understand and accommodate different user goals. When accommodations aren’t feasible, choose designs that support the most common user scenarios. For example, subscribers to online TV streaming services have different viewing preferences, and designs need to take those into consideration.
