Headline Usability - Creating Concise and Information Headlines

Creating concise and informative headlines can go a long way in improving usability of your webpage.

Whether you present links to articles on your homepage or have an archived section of news and feature articles, ensuring headline usability is a must. Doing so gives readers and even casual visitors to your site a pleasantly quick and informative glimpse into what you have to offer without having to click through pages they may not be interested in.

Headline usability is essentially achieved with precise communication in a handful of words. As hard as it is to write concise, scan-able and objective content for the Web, it is even harder to write headlines for the content.

In writing headlines, following a set of guidelines, as set out by Jakob Nielsen, may help in creating concise and informative headlines that maximize usability. Headlines must be:

• Short (because people don’t read much online);
• Rich in information (clearly summarizing the target article);
• Front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
• Understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and
• Predictable, so users know whether they will like the full article before they click (because people don’t return to sites that promise more than they deliver).

The most important thing to remember about writing headlines is to be concise and informative. Each word used should be meaningful. This allows you to create a headline that will communicate to the reader a proper idea of what the article is about without forcing them to click through to find out. Optimum headline usability will limit, if not eliminate, wasted clicks for users as they will be able to tell which articles they would be interested in reading from the headline itself.

Keep in mind that people’s attention span is not very long and their tolerance for vague and misleading information is low. So when you go to create a headline, keep it short and sweet; clear-cut; concise and informative. Jakob Nielsen even recommends visiting reputable sources such as BBC News to get an idea of how to achieve remarkable headline usability. You may discover how BBC editors create such excellent headlines and apply their discipline to the headlines you create.