Designing for Online vs. Print
According to Jakob Nielson, if a website is not easy to use, people simply leave and ignore the page (Jakob Nielson 2006). Thus, a webpage designer need to be aware of the tecniques to design a webpage in order to attract people. Document designers need to resist 'romancing the screen' and focus on how readers interact with the document. A better does not equals to a better communication necessarily (Schriver 1997). According to Nielson's research findings, 79% of the users always scan information on the computer screen, whereas only 16% of users will only read it word-by-word. Besides that, Nielson also pointed out that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from papers. He also pointed out that a web content should be 50% of the paper equivalent (Jakob Nielson 2006). In Nielson's findings, he found that users' main reading behaviour was fairly consistent across many different states and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks like an F-shaped pattern.
Users first read in a horizontal movement, across the top part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar. Next, users will move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement . This element forms the F's lower bar. Finally, users will scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. This last element forms the F's stem.
The F pattern's implications for the web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the web. Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information and start subheads, paragraphs and bullet points with information-carrying words.
The three main guidelines for writing for the web are to be succinct, which is write not more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication. Then, write for scannability, don't require users to read long continuos sentence of the text. Try to use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages.
According to Jakob Nielson, if a website is not easy to use, people simply leave and ignore the page (Jakob Nielson 2006). Thus, a webpage designer need to be aware of the tecniques to design a webpage in order to attract people. Document designers need to resist 'romancing the screen' and focus on how readers interact with the document. A better does not equals to a better communication necessarily (Schriver 1997). According to Nielson's research findings, 79% of the users always scan information on the computer screen, whereas only 16% of users will only read it word-by-word. Besides that, Nielson also pointed out that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from papers. He also pointed out that a web content should be 50% of the paper equivalent (Jakob Nielson 2006). In Nielson's findings, he found that users' main reading behaviour was fairly consistent across many different states and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks like an F-shaped pattern.
Users first read in a horizontal movement, across the top part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar. Next, users will move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement . This element forms the F's lower bar. Finally, users will scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. This last element forms the F's stem.
The F pattern's implications for the web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the web. Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information and start subheads, paragraphs and bullet points with information-carrying words.
The three main guidelines for writing for the web are to be succinct, which is write not more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication. Then, write for scannability, don't require users to read long continuos sentence of the text. Try to use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages.
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