On average, users read fewer than 28% of the words on a web page, according to Jakob Nielsen. How do you make those 28% of words count?
In his May 6, 2008 Alertbox, How Little Do Users Read, Nielsen writes about calculations he did based on research on how people behave online. He calculated that [...]
Author Archives: Mike Beasley
Control Your Message By Keeping Web Copy Brief
May 6, 2008 – 10:27 am
Reconciling Calls to Action with What the User Wants to Do
April 28, 2008 – 9:57 am
When writing copy for your website, good calls to action matter. These are the links (or even navigation items) that steer your users toward what you want them to do. It’s important, though, to not lose sight of what your website’s users may actually want to do.
Just because you want your website’s users to buy [...]
Tell Your Potential Customers Why You’re the Right Choice
March 26, 2008 – 6:55 pm
Why does your business exist? Why should your potential customers choose you over anyone else? What differentiates you from the competition? The people coming to your site may not even know who you are. You’ve got to get this all across to the user immediately, before he or she decides to pass your site by.
After [...]
Good Link Text Matters
March 12, 2008 – 11:13 am
Why do users click on links? Because they think there will be something good on the other side. Putting it like that makes the answer sound trivial, but that makes it no less true.
Good link text–when a link concisely and accurately describes the destination page–is good for everyone. From a usability perspective, it’s a no-brainer. [...]
Is your text readable?
March 4, 2008 – 10:55 am
According to the National Adult Literacy Study, the average adult in the United States reads at a 7th grade level. This study, if it is to be believed, indicates that that when texts are beyond the reading ability of the reader, they give up.
Are we writing text for our websites that is too complicated for [...]
Influencing Users with the Campaign Contribution Form
February 22, 2008 – 3:11 pm
Radio buttons, by their very nature, have only one option selected at a time. For the sake of consistency, it is important to have a default option when presenting the user with radio buttons. The current four candidates for U.S. president all have contribution pages on their websites that let users choose a contribution amount [...]
The Modern Command Line Interface
February 14, 2008 – 1:12 pm
Command line interfaces are the wave of the future.
Aza Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want rather than requiring a structured syntax.
Still, I find myself typing all the time rather than using the mouse. When I starting using [...]
