Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Make Text Scannable

To know how to write, first you need to know how people read.

Jakob Nielsen’s research shows that people typically don’t read text on the Web word by word. Instead, they “scan” the page, looking for sentence fragments that contain what they are looking for. To help people do that, Nielsen suggests^[20] the following rules:

• Use words that make sense to your audience.
• Convey one idea in each paragraph.
• Use meaningful headings.
• Highlight keywords.
• Use bullet lists.
• Keep text short, simple, and informal.
• Start text with conclusions, and include a summary of its content.
• Introduce the paragraph’s idea in the first sentence so people can quickly decide whether to read the paragraph.