Web Usability Research: text content on a Web page

This tutorial translates from: HowUsable is Your Copy?

When we talk about usability, we always refer to the design and layout of the user interface (UI)-buttons, tags (label), tags (tab), and so on. However, there is an element that may be overlooked by you may be destroyed by the Web site you have worked so hard to design, that is (text) content.

These are all aspects of the text that you use on your site, and it covers what type of text content. Today Web Web teaching network to talk about the usability of the site analysis is about how the text content of the site to guide and inform visitors, such as: How to guide users to download the required files, how to subscribe to your website feed, tell the site is about what and so on. Although the content of the king, but must be the content of my layout is the key.

So how does the text content affect the usability of the site? To answer this question, let me explain in a graphical way how users usually browse the Web. It can be said to be very confusing. We never read all the content of a particular page. Instead, we are accustomed to scanning the entire Web page quickly, jumping from this point on the page to another point, and trying to find what we want. The following figure shows a path to a user's general browsing of the web, and red lines and dots indicate different visual movements and points of stay.

These behaviors happen very quickly, and it takes only a few seconds for us to scan the pages and find what we're interested in.

The biggest problem with text content is its length, and it's easy to write a lengthy speech, especially when you know what to talk about. You may be naïve enough to think that there are a lot of things you can do to help your users, so they will definitely read all of them. Actually, they wouldn't do that!

Users are happy to glance at a small segment of information, and most people lose patience with large paragraphs of text, and sometimes even accept a sentence. You have to provide both a brief and a certain visual focus on the Web page. This Focus has two roles: attracting users ' attention and allowing them to take further action .

Let's take a look at an example, which is the Content section on the homepage of MacPorts, and the Mac tool can help you install a variety of open source software.

Its text content is too much, no one is willing to read all content , even if read the entire content, the user's mood will also be hit. I guess most of the people who come here are trying to download macports, but that installation link is buried deep in the text, hard to find. In fact, 80% of the text can be deleted without losing a bit of information value. Here's my quick redesign :

Although not perfect, the availability of multiple Web sites has been greatly improved. If I were given more time to redesign, I would rewrite the header and footer sections. In fact, the most important part of the redesign is the "Get Started" section, which guides the user in how to start their browsing journey. Clear goals, concise markup text, larger fonts, and click-and-Guide can help users better scan the page, thereby enhancing the user experience and increasing the usability of the site. Users can see those effective links and quickly find what they're looking for without reading as much text as they want.

Useful text content must be brief, use larger fonts to attract users ' attention, and use the next description of the profile without losing the details. The most important thing is to delete unnecessary words and sentences that are worthless.

What makes it even worse is that you may feel that your writing is short enough, that you are the author of it, and you know what you are going to say. But viewers don't necessarily know what you mean, they try to figure out what they need. But keep in mind that users are not necessarily reading, they are here to do what they want to do, each person's purpose is not necessarily the same, so you have to save their time and see your content to attract the attention of each user, so that they are more convenient in a few seconds to scan the entire page. Users can only scan and discover what they want in a matter of seconds before they continue to stay on your site for a longer period of time.