Common sense and usability rules

There are a lot of best practices when it comes to online content and usability. Some of them are best, and some of them are merely practices.

Three “practices” that have made it through to corporate marketing and web departments are: making users scroll is bad; opening links in a new window is good; lists (and secondary navigation) of more than 5-7 items are bad.

Is there a future for corporate websites?

No.

Well, not as we currently know them.

Site sections devoted to company information such as About Us, Our Business/What we do, Our company, Corporate social responsibility, and so on have no future. The information they do contain that has any use will be pared down (and probably end up as a pdf).

What will remain is recruitment, media and investor information sitting behind product information, such as in the newly relaunched Panasonic dotcom/UK website or at IBM dotcom/UK.

The general model now is that the companyname.com URL (or doteu, dot -fr-uk-de, etc) is the corporate/brand website offering investor, media, regulatory, CSR, governance information, etc.

The dotcom is not a gateway to company products and marketing information.

That model is losing companies money by frustrating consumers and failing to direct them to marketing and product websites.

Just don’t buy, but can’t say why

Nielsen’s post, Alertbox: Middle-Aged Users’ Declining Web Performance has me muttering under my breath.

He says:

“Between the ages of 25 and 60, the time users need to complete website tasks increases by 0.8% per year.”

Press releases, templates, activity over passivity

Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.

Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.

One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).

This means something. I’m just not sure what.

So I was talking to a useability expert the other day. He told me he’d finally got round to watching Citizen Kane, but couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Could I enlighten him?

Me: “Well, for starters, what about the groundbreaking deep focus cinematography?”

Him: “Yeah, see – I was watching it on an Ipod Nano, so I didn’t get any of that…”

Yes, Mr Nielsen, right you are…

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, October 1, Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? has a great piece of advice: take the red pen to the extraneous introductory text and cut to the chase.

He then points out that:

“It’s easy to tell Web writers to cut the fluff. It’s harder to actually do it. Each time a new content contributor joins your team, you must drill them incessantly on the special guidelines for writing for the Web. The guidelines seem obvious, but it takes a lot of skill to design good verbiage.”

I like Jakob’s advice. I try and follow it whenever I can.

But he’s missing an important point here (and I’ll lay bets he knows it).

Lots of web writers and editors don’t need to be told to cut the puff, fluff and verbiage. They know how to write for the web because they’ve been reading useit.com for years.

They’ve been trained as copywriters, journalists and subeditors. They’ve been drilled by print editors during their very lean periods after university, college or school when they worked for next-to-nothing to learn their trade.

They can write tight copy. They can kill unnecessary adjectives. They can write short, punchy sentences. They can keep to one idea per paragraph. And they can do it in plain language, with their eyes closed and their hands tied.

What they can’t do is say “no, I won’t publish that” to the VP of marketing, or comms director, or other departmental boss who’s been called in to back up his marcomms people (or other contributors) who’ve been fighting the web team for that pointless “intro” text (and the rest) because, they say, it’s important.

Want to escalate the disagreement even further? It’s easier to just wait till after office hours and have a beer. No one’s going to read the intro text anyway … users know how to scan past it.

Windows Vista text guidelines

“Comprehensible text is crucial to effective UI. Professional writers and editors should work with software developers on UI text as an integral part of the design process. Have them work on text early because text problems often reveal design problems. If your team has trouble explaining a design, quite often it is the design, not the explanation, that needs improving.”

Windows Vista guidelines for “User Interface Text”: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa974176.aspx (accessed 180907).

Windows Vista’s Developer Center has guidelines for tone of voice and user interface text, which aim to improve user experience by helping professionals develop appropriate instructions.

Good resource for writers.

Writing for the web: is less still more?

Ten years ago John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen published a paper called “How to write for the web“, opening with the announcement that “studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text”.

In Internet years, 1997 is several lifetimes ago. Nevertheless, Morkes and Nielsen’s findings are still used to support the number one rule of writing for the web: less is more.

Of course, recommending that people try to be concise in their writing is never a bad thing. However, the findings announced by “newspaper design guru” Mario Garcia at the World Association of Newspapers Conference this week might give some of us pause for thought.

Following eyetracking studies by the Poynter Institute into how readers respond to online vs print content, Garcia’s team found that “people read more deeply and for longer online, leading to a more efficient absorption of information”.

On average, readers looking at a story online read 77% of the text, while readers looking at a story in a broadsheet newspaper read only 62% of the text. Overall, 63% of stories were read to completion online, against 40% for broadsheet newspapers.

Writing for a news website is not the same as writing for a corporate website. Still, I’ve got a feeling that Garcia’s findings may turn out to apply more widely. It’s not 1997 anymore.

Links:

“Eyetrack for what readers want online and in print”

Poynter Institute Eyetrack07.

Browsers browsers everywhere

After reading a little bit about Pei Wei’s original ViolaWWW browser (Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee, T.,1999, p60 ), first released in 1992, I checked out what browsers there actually are (have been developed) over and above Netscape, IE, Firefox and Opera. Call me an amateur anorak but I did feel a little joy when I saw the extensive list in Wikipedia’s page about web browsers.

Rankings

Benchmarking results for global corporates were published yesterday in the Financial Times with an article called Corporate websites: How well are we being served? by David Bowen of Bowen Craggs & Co.

The “Index of corporate website effectiveness” (rankings list) is available as a download (pdf or html) from the FT.

Looking through the rankings and the websites, it’s clear that it takes both investment and hard work to produce effective websites. The standards set by Siemens, BP, IBM and the others raise the bar for everyone else. It won’t do to be a global corporate and have a sub-standard website.

Last year the FT benchmarking report was done by Hallvarsson & Halvarsson. Some of their webrankings are available online.

>Bowen Craggs & Co blog

>Summary on e-consultancy