Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web
John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen (1997)
Complete Report

"Our studies suggest that current Web writing often does not support users in achieving their main goal: to find useful information as quickly as possible."

Findings:

• users do not read on the Web; instead they scan the pages, trying to pick out a few sentences or even parts of sentences to get the information they want.
• users do not like long, scrolling pages: they prefer the text to be short and to the point.
• users detest anything that seems like marketing fluff or overly hyped language ("marketese") and prefer factual information.
• users like summaries and the inverted pyramid writing style.

Conventional Guidelines:

• carefully organize the information.
• use words and categories that make sense to the audience.
• use topic sentences (several participants read only the first sentence of each paragraph).
• limit each paragraph to one main idea.

Suggestions:

• Simple, conversational and informal writing is preferred
• Humor should be used with caution. Given people's different preferences for humor, it is important for a Web writer to know the audience, before including humor in a site.
• Users like well-organized sites that make important information easy to find.
• Text should be scannable. (Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents)
• Text should be concise so users can find information quickly.
• Graphics and text must complement one another

Versions: Control | Concise | Scannable | Objective | Combined

Conclusions:

"Our study suggests that scannable, concise, and objective writing styles each make a positive difference in Web users' performance and subjective satisfaction. Promotional writing, which is the style most commonly found on the Web today, had much lower scores on virtually all usability measures.
The good results for the objective language condition may be because it might be easier to process objectively written text than promotional text.

Since there is no inherent conflict between concise, scannable, and objective texts, we recommend that Web authors employ all three principles in their writing. Indeed, in our case study the combined effect of employing all three improvements was much larger than any of the individual improvements taken alone: our combined version recorded a 124% improvement in measured usability, whereas the three individual improvements "only" scored from 27% to 58%.

In one of our other projects [Morkes and Nielsen, 1998], we rewrote actual pages from Sun's website according to our guidelines. In addition to making them concise, scannable, and objective, we also split them into more pages, using hypertext links to move less important material from top-level pages to secondary pages, thus making the primary pages even shorter. The rewritten pages scored 159% higher than the originals in a set of usability metrics much like the ones used in the present study.

We thus have data from two studies where measured usability improved by 124% and 159%, respectively, when rewriting the text according to our guidelines."

Analyze & Review

Choose two sites on the web

1. "What would you say is the primary purpose of the site?"
2. "How would you describe the site's style of writing?"
3. "How do you like the way it is written?"
4. "How could the writing in this website be improved?"
5. "How easy to use is the website? Why?"
6. "How much do you like this site? Why?"
7. "Do you have any advice for the writer or designer of this website?"
8. "Think back to the site you saw just before this one. Of the two sites, which did you like better? Why?"

Writing Resources