Another story:
When I am concerned about the effect Nice Green Energy’s fracking will have on the planet I want to find out contact details So I can complain
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Acceptance criterion:
This story is done when I know how I can complain to Nice Green Energy.
This one is also easy: a simple page with several different routes to complain (phone, email, post).
When I find out Nice Green Energy’s fracking might happen near me
I want to find out exactly where and when So I can decide what I am going to do Acceptance criterion:
This story is done when I know where Nice Green Energy’s fracking will take place.
For this, you’re thinking a map with a timetable.
We also need to look into providing alerts to the team to change the content when the dates of proposed fracking sites go through their consultation and active stages.
When I find out fracking might happen near me I want to find out who is responsible So I can decide what I am going to do next Acceptance criterion:
This story is done when I know who is responsible for the proposed fracking near me.
You need to be careful with this one: you will be handling other organisations’ information. That means it’s up to you to make sure the information you provide is up to date. Let’s say your organisation has decided
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to go ahead with this page. A rival company called MuckyGen has a fracking site not far away, and you don’t want to get mixed up in their bad publicity.
You’ll need a map pulling in all the other energy companies’ data so you can display it with yours, with as little work as possible. The development and design teams need to put it on their lists of things to do.
When I want to find out about fracking I want to find out the facts from the fiction So I can make an informed judgement about it Acceptance criterion:
This story is done when I know what’s a myth and what the real facts are about how fracking affects the environment and my area.
From the forum research work, we know people like myth-buster articles. There are a lot of scary stories surrounding fracking, few of which have any basis in science or fact. So you have decided to create some content to give people firm facts.
Lastly, you have:
When I want to find out what the government is saying about fracking
I want to see all the latest, relevant information easily and quickly
So I know what the legal and political position is
This is a very large subject and it’s not Nice Green
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Energy’s responsibility to cover it. The government publishes all that information anyway. You might want to link to it, but you don’t need to repeat it.
What do you
want to control?
You and your organisation need to make a decision on how much you are going to publish and what you want to control.
For example, your desk research showed there is another website that shows fracking locations across the UK on a map. It’s easy to understand and presented well. Do you need to have your own version of that?
Sometimes, the answer is yes: if you want to control the messages, you don’t trust the other website, or the map is inaccessible or out of date. You don’t want to link to a site that might say you are causing environmental damage, or send your readers to a map that displays incorrect site locations. You may end up with your audience having a negative view of your company, because of someone else’s content.
Sometimes, you just want to keep users on your site as long as possible so you can give them all the facts as you see them (or encourage purchases if you are retail site, for instance). It wouldn’t be beneficial for
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you to send those users off to another site when they might not come back.
However, if someone is doing it better than you and you don’t need to do it, don’t bother. Don’t try to control things that you don’t need to control. Focus on the value you and your organisation can add. Get that right first, and then perhaps come back to the map idea later when you have done more research, come up with a better idea, or realised you can do it in a better way.
Style and tone
If you already have a style guide, then you can get writing. If you don’t have one, you can borrow one from elsewhere. The BBC, the Guardian and GOV.UK have all published style guides on the web. If you have time, you can always adapt one of these to suit your needs, or write one from scratch. You can shape your style and tone based on research.
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Now
finally
you are ready
to write.
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Writing content
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Earlier, about
securing sign-off,
we talked about
getting agreement
from colleagues
and management to
basic structure for
the content, perhaps
even a set of headings
and subheadings.
Now’s the time to
put them to use.
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When a page of
text is broken up
this way, it’s easier
for readers to take
in the information.
They can
understand or
predict what
information is on
the page, because
the subheadings
tell a story.
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Headings and
subheadings
As a content designer, you are not just putting words on a page because the words work. You are taking your users on a journey. The words are only part of that experience.
Headings are very important
Search engines think that the words you put in headings and titles are really important. If your heading is ‘London: top 10 places to visit’ you’ll probably get higher search engine rankings than if it is ‘Visit the party capital of the UK’ (and you’ll have to put
‘London’ pretty close to the title – make it the first word in the copy – in case people think it’s Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh).
Headings are the first thing your audience will see in search results, so make them targeted and relevant.
Your headings are what will pull your audience to your site from search or, if your audience is already on your site, it will tell them they are in the right place.
Hilarious headings
Humour is hard on the internet. It’s very easy for people
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to misinterpret. If you have witty headings, be sure your audience will get the joke or you risk putting off potential clients or annoying your audience. Of course, content marketing will often use vague titles to pull in an audience. You’ve probably seen a picture with link text saying: ‘You’ll never believe what happened next!’
Don’t write like that. There’s now research that shows it doesn’t work anyway.
The reality is that most users, most of the time, are people on a mission. They have a specific task in mind.
They will skip your funny jokes to get to the more meaningful content.
Your tone and style can come out in different ways, and the words and interactions on the page can carry your brand. A heading is a signpost to content.
Front-loading your headings
Think about front-loading your headings. The faster people consume your information (the scientific bit about how people read is in chapter 2), the happier they are, generally.
Front-loading means putting the most important word(s) of the sentence at the beginning. If you front-load your headings, you make it easier and qui
cker for readers to understand the content.
For example, which of these headings is
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quicker to understand?
What are the facts about fracking?
or
Fracking: the facts
The second one’s more effective, because it’s the one people will understand faster. The earlier the most important words appear, the better.
Another couple of examples:
How to apply for a membership or
Apply for membership
When will my delivery arrive?
or
Delivery times
Again, the second choices are front-loaded and will be more easily understood.
You can use statements to get to the point or for a more authoritative tone, and you can use them for more casual purposes too:
What to do about bullying
or
Bullying: spot it and stop it First paragraph
The first paragraph on the page is to orientate the reader – it tells them that they are in the right place and
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that they will get the information they are looking for.
Your audience has probably followed a search engine result or link somewhere to get to you. The first things people want to know are ‘Did I make the right choice?’
and ‘Do I need to go back and search again or find something else?’
Years ago, when I worked in advertising, I heard there was an old adage that copywriters held in their minds when writing: ‘You have 5 seconds to get my attention, and 11 to keep it.’ Now, I think it’s much shorter.
You probably have 3 seconds to get my attention, and 5 to keep it.
So the first paragraph on a page is very, very important.
Make those 3 seconds count.
Headings for pages that just do one thing If your page just does one thing – perhaps it’s a tool, or displays a video – your page title should be specific enough to tell the user exactly what they’re getting. If your audience is in a task-completion mode, many will simply skip any text you put at the top of the page anyway.
If you need to interrupt their task-based behaviour, make sure you really have to and that it’s pertinent to starting the action.
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That said, I have seen this ‘ignore all words and get to the action’ behaviour on many sites I’ve worked on.
In some circumstances, I have observed all research participants read every single word placed before the tool they were to use. Admittedly, there were just two sentences on that page, but even that surprised me.
The point I’m trying to make is: know your audience and test. Just because you think you know what is going to happen, doesn’t mean it will.
80/20 rule
So, with your research and your user needs, you know what is important for your audience. With that in mind, you can put what most people are looking for right up front (remember the GOV.UK bank holidays example we looked at in chapter 3). This is the 80/20 rule. Put the information that 80% of your audience is looking for first. The information the other 20% of your audience is looking for should be there – and findable from a search engine – but not front and centre. It will put off 80% of your audience.
Getting rid of users
In content marketing spheres, the thought of getting rid of users is probably a cardinal sin, but with good content design you will respect your users’ time. If they are on the wrong page, you will need to get rid of them as soon as possible.
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If you are selling an item and the user is on the wrong page, offering an unobtrusive alternative can benefit your organisation. (But never with a pop-up that says
‘Are you sure you want to leave?’ That’s just one of the most annoying things on the web.) A well-placed search box on the page will always offer an alternative if the user thinks they will get what they want.
If you have a task-based information page – say, to apply for something – making sure your audience is eligible to make the application is probably the most important thing. No one wants to waste time on something they definitely can’t get. For example, Nice Green Energy’s page for school-age children interested in doing work experience might begin with: Apply for work experience
You are only eligible for work experience at Nice Green Energy if you:
• are over 16
• live within a 10-mile radius of our head office at (address)
• include a scan of a signed letter from your head teacher with your application Scent of information vs the three-click rule There’s a book called Information Foraging Theory written by Peter L T Pirolli, published in 2007. Despite its age, it’s an mine of information that is mostly still relevant today. In short (I’m reducing 216 pages to a sentence here), it says that users will go as far as they
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need to, and click as many times as they need to, as long as the ‘scent of information’ is strong.
In other words: as long as a person thinks they will get the information they need, and they don’t think they are on the wrong path, they will continue for quite some time.
You can use this for structuring the information on your website, in-page copy, and tools and transactions. As long as you follow your audience’s mental model of how the information will be available, and you provide a strong scent of information, you are on the right path.
That’s not an excuse to be verbose. What I’m saying is: people don’t always abandon a task within a set number of clicks.
Subheadings
Subheadings on a page have a number of different purposes:
● Subheadings tell a story.
People often look down a page when they land on it to see how long it is and what it is about. Subheadings help you tell your audience in seconds exactly what information they are going to get. Your visitor can then see if they are on the right page and if they should give their time and attention.
● Subheadings break up the text.
Most people don’t want to be greeted with a wall
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of text. Most of us will go through it if we want the information, but it automatically makes it seem a little bit harder. Subheadings make the task easier.
● Subheadings help you remember and understand.
When you read a very complex or long document, your brain will see subheadings as markers. If you need to go back through the text you have read, it’s easier to remember where that info is if there’s a subheading nearby (particularly if your subheadings tell a coherent story).
Remember all the vocabulary you found in analytics and in forums? Those words are perfect for headings and subheadings. If people have a word or phrase in mind, they will look for it on the page to make sure they are in the right place. Search engines will regard those terms as important to the content and may rank you higher than someone who has just put a single version of that term on the page somewhere.
Writing and
punctuation
Bullet points break things up In the same way that subheadings break up text, so do lists. It’s not a good idea to have an entire page of them – that’s hard to read – but bullets can be
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great because they:
● can make text quicker to read
● make the page less dense
● can bring out the most important points without adding other design elements that might clutter your page
The way you do bulleted lists is a matter of style.
Generally I’d go with: if it has a lead-in sentence, use lowercase at the start of each of the bullet points.
If there’s no lead-in, uppercase. Punctuation at the end of a sentence is entirely optional. Screen readers (software products designed to help people with visual impairments read digital content) w
ill pause longer if there is a comma at the end of each point. That’s about it, though.
Word counts aren’t always important You can be boring in 5 words or fewer. I generally don’t follow word counts for that reason. I find people won’t keep it short if they think they have space to fill up.
Often, especially for task-based pages, the shorter the content, the better.
If you keep to the user need, you’ll be interesting and, therefore, engaging.
Different audiences will go to different lengths to get their information and they’ll want it in different ways.
Some academics love 100,000-word PDFs because
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they can print them off more easily than some web pages. They print because they like being able to mark up notes on paper, not on screen. The rest of the web world screams ‘No PDFs!’ (with good reason – they are not very accessible, for example) but if your web pages don’t print very well, you can see why people want PDFs, right?
The way to find the correct word count is:
● answer the user need – and only the user need
● don’t be boring (aka verbose)
● think how your audience will use the information (this will influence the format it is in)
● respect your audience’s time and the environment they are in (this may influence how long they will read for)
Keep sentences short
I’m not the only one who says this.
The Oxford Guide to Plain English recommends 15–20
words per sentence. It also says:
‘ If you regularly exceed 40 words, you’ll certainly weary and deter your readers.’
Jyoti Sanyal, author of Indlish (the book for every English-speaking Indian), said:
‘ Based on several studies, press associations in the USA have laid down a readability table. Their survey shows readers find sentences of 8 words or less very
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easy to read; 11 words, easy; 14 words fairly easy; 17
words standard; 21 words fairly difficult; 25 words difficult and 29 words or more, very difficult.’
Author Ann Wylie said:
‘ When the average sentence length in a piece was fewer than 8 words long, readers understood 100%
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