Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Many of the articles listed on this page summarize findings from the Nielsen Norman Group's research about how users read on the web, and how authors should write their web pages.
Start here: How Users Read on the Web (short summary of the original findings)
See Also
What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.
If using web or browser-related terms, consider defining them in place to make websites easier for senior citizens. Avoid using technical words if they are not necessary.
Should you say who wrote the content on your site? Sometimes yes (for credibility), sometimes no (for brevity). And rarely in mobile.
Writing for mobile readers requires even harsher editing than writing for the Web. Mobile use implies less patience for filler copy.
Mobile devices require a tight focus in content presentation, with the first screen limited to only the most essential information.
A confusing startup screen that offends existing subscribers dooms The Wall Street Journal's iPhone app to low ratings.
Cloze Tests provide empirical evidence of how easy a text is to read and understand for a specified target audience. They thus measure reading comprehension, and not just a readability score.
When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores.
People remember much more after reading if they retrieve information about the text from memory. Quizzes are one way websites can help users remember more.
Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.
A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print.
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.
A timeline message was made more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign. (Text as UI.)
Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.
Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.
User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.
Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics.
Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don't serve their needs or list a PR contact.
Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language.
Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.
Over the past 5 years the usability of corporate sites' About Us information improved by 9%. But companies and organizations still can't explain what they do in one paragraph.
Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
Typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions.
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.
Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.
Introductory text on Web pages is usually too long, so users skip it. But short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content's purpose.
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.
It's better to use '23' than 'twenty-three' to catch users' eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.
Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site.
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.
Make new or follow-up information easily accessible from the location of the original information or transaction.
Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message.
Search engine ads are one type of Web advertising that can actually work. To create the best ads, do quick experiments and redesign ads based on usability principles for online writing. Doing so helped us increase ad click-through by 55% to 310%.
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?
Corporations spend millions on PR, and yet the press sections of their websites often fail to meet journalists' most basic information needs. In our recent usability study, journalists found answers to only 68% of their questions across a range of corporate sites.
Regulatory agencies should not transfer their rules from the print world unchanged to Web content that is being read in a different manner. Instead, regulations should concern the usability of the actual information and whether users understand it.
Poynter study confirms older Web content studies: plain headlines work best; users hunt for info, often ignore graphics, and interlace sites.
Online headlines must be absolutely clear when taken out of context. They should be written in plain language (no puns or clever headlines). 5 additional guidelines + examples of bad microcontent.
In 5-10 years, newspapers, magazines, books, and TV will cease being separate media forms and will be integrated into unified multimedia Web services.
Rewriting pages from a popular website improved measured usability by 159%. Word count was cut to 54%; long pages were split into hypertext; Web writing guidelines were applied.
Users don't read Web pages, they scan. Highlighting and concise writing improved measured usability 47-58%. Marketese imposed a cognitive burden on users and was disliked.
Reading from screens is 25% slower than from paper and we know that Web users skim rather than read. Web text should be short, emphasize scannability, and be structured into multiple hyperlinked pages (each focused on a subtopic).
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.
Web copy should follow the inverted pyramid style: start with the conclusion. Many users won't see anything else. (Updated in 2003 and 2011.)
Paper remains the optimal medium for some forms of writing, especially for long works like a book. It is an unfortunate fact that current computer screens lead to a reading speed that is approximately 25% slower than reading from paper. We have invented better screens and it is just a matter of time before reading from computers is as good as reading from paper, but for the time being we have to design our information for the actual screens in use around the world.