Demosthenes Practising Oratory (Jean-Jules- Antoine-Lecomte du Nouy, 1870)
You may be a great writer but are you a great communicator? If you are trying to inform your readers, use simple words. Avoid buzzwords, jargon and highfalutin words. And don’t look like an ad promotion. You will be ignored.
So says website usability guru Jakob Nielsen. One of his latest studies revealed that 86% of website readers could not find the answer to the question: “What’s is the US population”, despite the answer being highlighted in red on the US Census Bureau home page.
The eye-tracking heat map showed that readers scanned the red highlighted text but did not read it.
Why, you ask? Here’s the reason, according to Jakob:
…the major reason this homepage failed is that it used made-up terms or branded descriptions rather than plain-spoken words. Terms like “Population Clock,” “Population Finder,” and “QuickFacts” are not as descriptive as a simple line of text that says : Population of the United States: 302,740,627.
Because of the ad’s formatting, he also blamed banner blindness, a reader’s tendency to avoid reading anything that looks like an ad.
So, check your real estate or business website and see if you can make things a little clearer to your readers.
Subscribe here for Mr. Nielsen’s Alertbox and get his latest findings on the mysterious world of the internet.
Related Posts:
10 Tips to Better Writing
How to Improve Your Website: Alertbox
Further Reading:
Buzzwods say all the wrong things (37Signals)
Writing for the Web
KISS
P.S. See you at the Tech Fair!
Right back at ya Linda.
And pictures can help too.
The banner blindness is very real. A couple days ago I had to look for 2-3 minutes for a small banner on one of my own pages before I found it. I’m completely serious.
It is interesting to track reader habits. I know I am a scanner and ignore the banners. Nielsen’s Alertbox is a worthwhile scan, I mean read.