Writing for web
Adapted from museum training sessions I’ve given for the South East Museums Development Group, Oxford University Museums and Gardens and Bradford Museum Group.
The behavioural theorist Daniel Kahneman has a theory about how humans process information.
In his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, he posits that there are two ‘modes’ of thinking. Which he classes as ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’.
They can be roughly distinguished from one another like this:
Or, in his words:
‘System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration.’
Kahneman, 2012, p. 21
Our job, as writers, is to reduce the cognitive load of our content. We can do this by making it easy to find specific information, and by making that information as clear and easy to understand as possible.
This theory of information processing doesn’t just apply to writing for the web, but it does become much more pertinent, as will become more clear in this next section; how people read on the web.
I. How people read on the web
The short version: they don’t.
The slightly longer version: they don’t, they scan.
The picture above shows a passage of text. The blue lines above it represent the average results of where a reader has looked at that text online.
You can see that readers are not reading each work in sequence. They’re more strategic than that: by focussing on nouns and some verbs a reader can get the jist of what a passage of text says without sequentially registering each individual word.
There are important implications of this.
- Passives, particles and negatives are all small inconsequential looking words that we’re likely to gloss over if we’re scanning text quickly. This can mean that someone looking over your text comes away with the opposite of your intended meaning, if your sentences contain a lot of negatives and passives.
- In the picture, look at the following sentence ‘If a piece of content isn’t working in research, you might be able to find out why based on how humans work, not just what that person is thinking at the time’.
- You can see that the text I’ve bolded ‘not just what’ has caused readers some issues, they’ve had to go back and read the clause again to make sense of it, ‘not just what that’ is a bit of a confusing phrase in itself, you have to scan quite a way before you get your next noun ‘person’ and can start piecing together the meaning. If a reader initially skipped over ‘not’, the sentence doesn’t make sense, which means they have to go back and reread more slowly to make it make sense.
- For everyone who goes back and rereads you text to make sense of it, others won’t bother, will either carry on with an incomplete understanding of what you’re saying or become disenchanted with your text as a whole and leave.
Most readers do this a little when they’re reading print documents. But everyone does it a great deal more when reading online.
That’s partly to do with the nature and context of our online reading. The Internet is not like a book — you can’t sit down and read it page by page and have a sense of how far through it you are.
There are also far more distractions online than when you’re tucked up in a book. At the same time as you’re reading this, you may likely have tabs open with social media notifications popping up, your inbox on your computer may start pinging you incoming mail, and your phone might light up with the same or new notifications again.
When you are writing for web you are not playing to an audience that has your sole attention. So making your content as easy, clear, and pleasing to digest is much more important than it is with print media.
The most substantial body of research into this has been made by the Nielsen Norman Group. They developed eye-tracking as a research method to look at how people get meaning from online content. Their work established difference between reading (which we actually don’t do a whole lot of online) and scanning.
Reading includes looking at most words in chronological order in a section or on an entire page. But when scanning, people look at words, headings, or sections of pages, often out of order, fixating on only some of the words, not entire lines of text.
Scanning is not a random sequence of visual fixations. Rather, the method can be extremely targeted. In sometimes less than a second, a user can complete an initial appraisal of a page, estimating the nature, quality, importance, and potential value to them of the information on the page.
What does this mean for how we write content online?
These summary points are all drawn from Nielsen Norman’s research, which you can get a free summary of, or download their full (paid) report, which contains all the visualisations of how people scanned entire webpages.
The main takeaways of the report is that when someone lands on a page, they will quite quickly give it a quick appraisal to get some more context on what information this page contains, whether it answers what they were looking for, how reputable the site seems to be. They will not sit and read each word in sequence to get this information. If your content passes that initial test they will then go through and read the page more methodically, but again fixating on sections that appear most relevant to them.
You can make it easier for audiences to get a sense of what your content is about by:
- Introducing formatting: bolded out keywords, Capitals and hyperlinks (particularly when the hyperlink colour is bright blue) will all draw the eye.
- Breaking up large walls of text with images, section headings and bullet points.
For long pages with lots of repetitive content (e.g. a description of lots of different kinds of amulet), you can reduce cognitive load by formatting each item in the same way — that means that if a reader has scanned the information for one item they can correctly intuit where they need to look to get the information for another. This also applies to using design styles and modules consistently throughout the site. In both cases, once a user has worked out how the site is structuring information in one section they learn how to expect information in the same format elsewhere in your site.
Summary
Elements that attract the eye
- Pictures
- Headings and content ‘chunking’
- Bullet points
- Numbers, links, formatted text, special characters (dashes, percentages, exclamation and question marks)
Writing style
- Plain English
Best of luck. If you have any questions, drop me a comment here. You can also email me at georgina@onefurther.com — I’d be most happy to hear any content related questions you might have.
