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Are you reading this? Really reading it?The Web grew several thousand words bigger all of a sudden not so long ago, and the writer of these words was to blame. I spent a fortnight building www.telstrashares.com, a Web site devoted to the Telstra float, for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. www.telstrashares.com fulfils two obvious needs. One is that more than million people plan to buy Telstra shares in its November 1997 float, many of them for the first time, and they will probably be looking for some guidance. The second need was to gather together and organise a number of articles by top Fairfax newspaper business writers like Age columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz and Elizabeth Knight of the Sydney Morning Herald (as well as lesser talents like your author). www.telstrashares.com looks a relatively simple site, and in a sense it is. It has little in the way of multimedia. It's mostly hyperlinked text, a series of essays on the future of the telecommunications game and Australia's biggest player in it. And putting text onto the Web is a very straightforward business. Deceptively straightforward, in fact. You can con yourself into believing that once your text is there - that several thousand words of great, topical, incisive writing - it will be read. Are you still reading ...?But while I was in the middle of building the telstrashares.com site, I took a visit to a site called Alertbox. And there, at eleven o'clock in the evening, Jakob Neilsen fed me a bitter-tasting supper of Web reality. Jakob Neilsen's an engineer, not a diplomat. He spends his days at Sun Microsystems' usability lab (he's a "Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer"). Then he writes book on user interface issues - at least seven to date. And to the benefit of Web designers everywhere, Dr Neilsen also writes articles about how people actually use Web sites - as opposed to how their designers would like to think they use sites. These he puts into his Alertbox site at www.useit.com, whose prosaic name shows his utilitarian bent. Neilsen titles a recent Alertbox instalment "How Users Read on the Web". His first paragraph reads, in full: "They don't." We've lost quite a few readers by now ...This crisp little Neilsen sentence was not what I wanted to read in the middle of hoisting thousands on words into telstrashares.com. It's one thing to say reading's a little hard on a computer. It's now well-established that reading a computer screen is harder than reading The Age over breakfast. The coarse mesh of pixels, the flickering 75-hertz-refresh-rate screen and the need to continually scroll see to that. It's another thing to say people just don't read, but that's what he's saying. "They don't read". Lest you toy with simply ignoring Neilsen's claims, he has a nine-page research paper to back it up, based on detailed studies of 71 users. Web site visitors SCANSo what do people do on all those text-filled Web pages, from The Age to Salon to microsoft.com? Let me quote Neilsen's Alertbox article again: "People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences ... John Morkes and I found that 79 per cent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 per cent read word-by-word." If you want to make your writing work on the Web, says Neilsen, you must make it scannable. What does that mean? Neilsen's own Alertbox article exemplifies his principles. It's relatively short, printing out in just over a single A4 page (Neilsen has long argued that users don't like to scroll). It includes two major headings, picks out a a fistful of key phrases in bold text, includes both a bulleted list of points and a table, gets to the point right at the start and uses plenty of short, punchy one-idea paragraphs. (Nothing, of course, is shorter, punchier or more to the point than that initial "They don't".) Neilsen's study also threw up another interesting finding, one which goes against the Internet stereotype: his users didn't like the hyped-up, commercial writing style that describes something as the hottest or coolest ever. Promotional language, he suggest, "imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts". Among his other conclusions:
Most of the Web's text-based sites are a long way from meeting many of Neilsen's criteria. Even sites which are presenting long text articles on the Web are putting little effort into making them scannable. The moral of the story: even when you aren't making an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia site, the Web is a unique medium. If you have printed matter to hand, you probably can't just throw it onto your Web site. You must work to refine text, condense it, and improve its scannability. www.telstrashares.com will need more work if it is to fulfil its charter and inform its audience.
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Jakob Neilsen's examination of Web reading