I’m a great admirer of Steve Krug’s
Don’t
Make Me Think
and recommend it to anyone who wants only a single book on the
subject of web usability. Steve’s chapter on text is based
on Strunk
and White’s reminder to “omit needless words”.
It’s a point well worth making and the chapter does
an admirable job of reducing 103 words of instruction on
a web page to a just-about-bearable 41.
However, in recent usability evaluations, several
other text-related problems have become common themes. They don’t
quite warrant a new book on their own (despite the very promising
title), but they should be included in general guidance on how
to avoid text abuse on the web. The first set concerns online
prose:
Use the “inverted pyramid” writing
style. This is a style of writing often used in journalism.
A summary of the article appears first. Interested
readers go on to get more detail. Uninterested readers
go on to the next item. -
Provide links into long articles. Anything longer than a
few paragraphs ought to be preceded by a brief list of headings
that link to appropriate sections. Not only will this give the
content an explicit structure, but it will help with accessibility.
-
Avoid using external documents for material that needs to
be read online. Word documents, Acrobat files and the like generally
present a host of usability and accessibility problems, including
but not limited to: horizontal scrolling, slow loading, no loading
(missing plug-in), lack of navigation, exclusion from search
engines.
- Excise gratuitous instructions. To be fair, Steve
does touch on this point but I think it is worth
repeating. Users read instructions only after all
else has failed (think about the last time you read
installation instructions before it went horribly
wrong). Anything along the lines of “fill in
these fields and click the button at the bottom” can
be removed without hesitation. Significantly more
elaborate prose probably means the basic page design
is too complex. Go back to the drawing board.
The second set describes a much more
ticklish area, where a few words need to be used in just
the right way to describe navigation and selection options:
Use terms that are appropriate to the
intended users, unambiguous and discriminable. Also make
sure that discriminability takes place at both the lexical
and semantic levels. That’s
to say that words and phrases should look different and mean
different things. So while no one should have trouble
misreading
“show” for “view”, the words mean
virtually the same thing to many people.
Ensure categories do not overlap, or
if they do that you are prepared to put appropriate items
in both.
-
Put the important words in a phrase
at the front in order to reduce the amount of reading
users have to do to reach a decision.
Do not rely on users reading every
single item in a list before making a selection (they
won’t). If you are having
a hard time making each item self-contained, put more specific
items at the top of the list so users can stop at the
first item that applies (becoming more general towards
the bottom of the list).
-
If list items are self-contained, put them in order of popularity.
For long lists, put popular items at the top, then all items
in alphabetical order (with a break in between).
Finally, some suggestions on page design in general with a view
to less reading on the part of users:
- Do not make pages more complex than they need to be for the
majority of users. Controls, labels and instructions that only
apply in 20% of cases make life miserable for 80% of users.
Either
- design a different path for advanced users or
- make use of progressive disclosure.
More experienced, less-harassed or just
plain curious users will be motivated to
explore. Use drop-down menus or other roll-overs
for advanced features (but don’t
forget accessibility for assistive
technologies)
- Be smart about consistency. Don’t try to
apply the same set of rules to your full-time call
center staff as you do your occasional e-commerce
customers. Branding and marketing are important considerations
for an extranet, but they must not outweigh the needs
for efficient tools internally.
The overriding theme of all this is that design really does
need to be visually obvious. While some text is unavoidable, consider
every word you place on a page and decide whether you could do
without it by providing better visual clues or approaching the
problem a different way. Remember that a user interface is usually
the journey, not the destination. In most cases users are in quite
a hurry to get where they’re going.
Bibliography
Steve Krug (2000),
Don't
Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,
Penguin Books, London (also at Amazon.co.uk)
William Strunk, E.B. White and Roger Angell
(2000),
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition,
Pearson Higher Education, Upper Saddle River,
NJ (also at Amazon.co.uk)
The Author
William Hudson is principal consultant for Syntagm Ltd, based
near Oxford in the UK. His experience ranges from firmware to
desktop applications, but he started by writing interactive software
in the early 1970's. For the past ten years his focus has been
user interface design, object-oriented design and HCI.
Other free articles on user-centred design: www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles.htm
© 2001-2005
ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here
by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in interactions,
{Volume 10, Issue 4, July-August 2003} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/838830.838883
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