User Experience Design: A reusable approach to writing

No matter what media you do, you'd better just write for your readers and their goals. For traditional media, the reader's goal is clear, from getting entertainment (reading myths) to obtaining investment advice (read the Wall Street Journal Market Edition).

However, writing on the web is different because a wide variety of users may have different approaches to the same content:

• read the page , although it's very rare for web users to read through, but people do.
• Scan the page to see if it's worth reading (or, first, whether the site is worth visiting).
• Scan the page to locate specific information, for different users, care about the different things. For example, when you buy a digital camera on the product page of an E-commerce website, users who are proficient in this way are concerned about the size of the sensor, while the less knowledgeable users are more interested in the number of pixels.
• Select items in the list, such as a serp (search engine results page), an E-commerce category page, or a news push list. (News feeds are also called RSS, but remember to avoid using this abbreviation; Usability research over the years confirms that many users don't even know what RSS is.)

In these scenarios, the user sees only a small portion of the content that is detached from the context . For example, they may only see the title, or it may be a title, a partial summary, and some thumbnail images.

writing for different context scenarios

The initial challenge is to write content that is still meaningful out of context. Fortunately, you can assess how your content is available in a common context -free scenario:

• If you can only see the title, does it make sense ? Does it contain sufficient information clues to attract users who may be interested in the full text? (Note: Should not mislead users, let users feel disappointed after clicking; Yes, so you can get extra clicks, but you'll lose customers because they're going to get sick and run away.) Title Party behavior)
• can a summary be added to the title when the two pieces are displayed together?
• is the picture of the pressure problem clear ? The list uses small pictures to depict the product or article; If your picture is not clear, kill it.

writing for different user goals

The second challenge is more difficult: the user's goals may be different from the main purpose of your writing , so is your article helpful to them?

We are testing how people read blogs and other types of Web content as a preparation for our upcoming workshop "Writing for Web 2.0". Our research shows how usability issues occur when readers and authors work with the same article for different purposes.

In one test, users read the corporate blog of Whole Foods, a large chain food store, and he was interested in a recent article on the health scare of peanut butter.

The user's goal is to find out whether the event involved Skippy peanut butter. Because a lot of the food was recalled and many readers wanted to comment, the blog article we used to test was already 28 screens long on the 1280*1024 display. The user was overwhelmed by this very long page, quickly finding the search in the page and typing "Skippy".

The screenshot below shows what happened next: Our test participants immediately found a user-submitted content, "Skippy is the peanut butter safe?" ”

The test participants went on to browse the blog further and searched for "Skippy" and found another user-submitted reply. Finally, the test participants searched the whole Foods and did not get an answer about Skippy peanut butter.

Very bad.

As the screenshot above shows, a mall worker's response follows the Chryl Smith question about Skippy. So why is it that when a user browses this official message, he ignores it altogether, even though it is so close to (a, adjacent) that the question is highlighted (b, highlighted) and has been flagged (c, marked) as an official reply?

Two reasons:

• This reply answered two questions in a post . We learned from countless user-page reading behavior studies that users generally read only the first part of any text. If you want to continue reading, the user must confirm that the text is worth reading. In this case, the user simply ignores the fact that the all-important first line of discussion has nothing to do with the user's problem.
• Also, in this example, the second part of the reply does not duplicate the core keyword of the problem , "Skippy", which is what the user looks for on the page. They replaced it with "the main domestic brand of peanut butter," which is a generic, generic, and less stimulating word-so it can't capture the user's eye.

modularity of content for task reuse

Although you can't predict what each individual user is looking for when they visit your site, you can write a way to support different goals.

Three important guiding principles:

• Assume that your information will be used out of context . The content may be displayed in different contexts, or the user can read only a small portion of the entire page. (The tips above will help you determine if your information is available when you are out of context.) ）
• modularize Your information, each piece of content for a single problem. If you want to include two things in one piece of content, the second thing is often overlooked.
• use the exact language . Specific diction is more likely to help those who have different ideas about the content. The user comes with different purposes and different ideas, so there is a different understanding of the content. Ordinary or general projects are misunderstood and overlooked, as we have seen in the example.

The most important and central principle of all is to be fully aware of the nature of the Web: people will use your copywriting in a variety of ways, far beyond your imagination, you need to be aware of this fact in online life, and try to write in compliance with this fact.