Tuesday, September 14, 2010

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.

Corporate Blogs - How to Structure a Good Home Page

Displaying summaries of many articles on the first page as opposed to presenting each posting’s full content may serve to attract users.

In creating homepage designs for blogs, you typically have two options:

  • Posting each article in its entirety on the first page so users can read it all without having to click to an article.
  • Providing article summaries on the first page that link to the full content on secondary pages.

When managing a corporate blog, it is important to remember that the number of postings may eventually reach the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the organization. Clearly, not every posting will fit on a single page. This is where you need article summaries linking to the full post in the archives.

Web Usability Design columnist Jakob Nielsen discusses in detail his findings through an eye-tracking study of how people read the “official” weblogs of corporations. His gaze plots diagram how users read the front page of several corporate blogs.

In short, his study revealed that the blogs featuring full articles on the front page lost the interest of users after the first post, whereas the blogs offering summaries on the homepage were able to attract the user to browse through more, if not all of the article summaries.

Through Nielsen’s study and general experience, corporate blogs fare much better with summaries rather than full articles on their homepage. Article summaries allow blogs to post more in a shorter page-length, thus exposing users to a broad selection of topics.

With more topics available in the same, if not shorter amount of space, users are more likely to find something that interests them. This will entice them to click through to read more, as opposed to abandoning the blog after the first full-length article failed to appeal to them. Few people will actually continue browsing after exhausting their interest on the first posting.

So for the most part, it is best to include summaries on the homepage of your corporate blog, especially if you have a wide product range with many topics to discuss. People are simply not fully interested in everything, but may prefer browsing through to find the one thing they are.

In the case that you do receive regular visitors that are passionate about everything your company does, you may want to post full articles as Nielsen recommends, but this is rare and unlikely. So stick to the summaries and offer a broad sample of articles in hopes of attracting a user’s interest and getting them to read on.