In essence, the Web inverts the process as users experience usability first before making a further investment of time and money. Krug (2006) further adds to this point by writing, “Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn’t make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don’t matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiasm – and time … if Web pages are going to be effective, they have to work most of their magic at a glance. And the best way to do this is to create pages that are self-evident, or at least self-explanatory” (p. 19).As a result of this overwhelming choice and the ease of going elsewhere, Web users exhibit a remarkable impatience and insistence on instant gratification. If they can’t figure out how to use a Web site in a minute or so, they conclude that it won’t be worth their time. And they leave.
Usability has assumed a much greater importance in the Internet economy than it has in the past. In traditional physical product development, customers did not get to experience the usability of the product until after they had already bought and paid for it. Say, for example, you buy a VCR and discover that it’s difficult to set the clock and that you cannot figure out how to program the taping of your favorite shows. Tough luck – the manufacturer is laughing all the way to the bank. (p. 10)
It is important for technical communicators to understand how individuals really use the Web. According to Krug (2006), “What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at” (p. 21). Moreover, simplicity is a key component of designing Web sites.
Screen real estate is an important term for technical communicators to be familiar with when designing the layout of a Web site. According to Nielsen (2000), “Web pages should be dominated by content of interest to the user. Unfortunately, we see many sites that spend more screen space on navigation than they do on the information that supposedly caused the user to visit in the first place. Navigation is a necessary evil that is not a goal in itself and should be minimized” (p. 18). Furthermore, there are five important items technical communicators should execute to ensure users view and comprehend as much of a Web site as possible: create a clear visual hierarchy, take advantage of conventions, divide pages into clearly define areas, make it obvious as to what is clickable, and minimize noise (Krug, 2006, p. 31).
In order to build an easy-to-follow Web site, technical communicators must create a clear visual hierarchy for each page. According to Krug (2006):
Therefore, a lack of visual hierarchy creates more work for users, which dissuades them from visiting a Web site.We all parse visual hierarchies – online and on paper – every day, but it happens so quickly that the only time we’re even vaguely aware that we’re doing it is when we can’t do it – when the visual cues (or absence of them) force us to think. A good visual hierarchy saves us work by preprocessing the page for us, organizing and prioritizing its contents in a way that we can grasp almost instantly.
But when a page doesn’t have a clear visual hierarchy – if everything looks equally important, for instance – we’re reduced to the much slower process of scanning the page for revealing words and phrases, and then trying to form our own sense of what’s important and how things are organized. (p. 33).
Utilizing conventions is another core aspect technical communicators should practice when designing a Web site. The Web’s conventions are mainly derived from magazine and newspaper design principles. According to Krug (2006), “If you’re not going to use an existing Web convention, you need to be sure that what you’re replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory that there’s no learning curve – so it’s as good as a convention, or (b) adds so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve. If you’re going to innovate, you have to understand the value of what you’re replacing, and many designers tend to underestimate just how much value conventions provide” (p. 36).
Web pages should be divided into clearly defined areas. This allows users to quickly distinguish which areas of the page to concentrate on and which areas they can disregard. Additionally, technical communicators should make it clear as to what is clickable as users are typically searching for the next link to click. Technical communicators are likely to waste the attention and patience of Web users by forcing them to think about something that should be mindless such as what is clickable within a Web page.
The minimization of visual noise is another characteristic of an easy-to-follow Web page. According to Krug (2006), “Users have varying tolerances for complexity and distractions; some people have no problem with busy pages and background noise, but many do. When you’re designing Web pages, it’s probably a good idea to assume that everything is visual noise until proven otherwise” (p. 39). Nielsen (2000) also found, “As with all layout, whitespace is not necessarily useless, as it would be a mistake to design overly compact pages. Whitespace can guide the eye and help users understand the grouping of information. If you have the choice between separating two segments of content by a heavy line or by some whitespace, it will often look better to use the whitespace, it will often look better to use the whitespace solution, which will typically also download faster” (p. 18).
It is imperative for technical communicators to recognize that the design layout allows Web users to access content. Nielsen (2000) expounds this point by writing, “Ultimately, users visit your Web site for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop … The old analogy is somebody who goes to see a theatre performance: When they leave the theatre, you want them to be discussing how great the play was and not how great the costumes were. Of course, good costume design contributes greatly to making the performance enjoyable and to bringing the author’s and director’s visions to the stage. But in the end, the play is the important thing” (p. 99-100). Furthermore, it is extremely important to omit needless words that are seemingly placeholders. According to Krug (2006), “Removing half of the words is actually a realistic goal; I find I have no trouble getting rid of half the words on most Web pages without losing anything of value” (p. 45).
Krug found there are two types of writing: happy talk and instructions. Generally, happy talk is the introductory text welcoming users to a Web site. He found, “A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great” (Krug, 2006, p. 46).
Another main source of unnecessary words is instructions, according to Krug. He writes, “The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them – at least not until after repeated attempts at ‘muddling through’ have failed. And even then, if the instructions are wordy, the odds of users find the information they need is pretty low. Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to the bare minimum” (Krug, 2006, p. 47).
When composing for the Web, technical communicators affect both the content and the main user experience because users look at the headlines and text initially. Technical communicators should adhere to specific rules when developing content for the Web. According to Nielsen (2000), the three main guidelines for writing for the Web include the following:
- Be succinct. Write no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used to cover the same material in a print publication
- Write for scannability. Don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text; instead, use short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted lists
- Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages (p. 101)
Web users are “scanners” by nature, which is another reason why technical communicators need to be succinct in their prose. According to Nielsen (2000), “Because it is so painful to read text on computer screens and because the online experience seems to foster some amount of impatience, users tend not to read streams of text fully. Instead, users scan text and pick out keywords, sentences, and paragraphs of interest while skipping over those parts of the text they care less about. In a study by John Morkes and myself, we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only very few users would read word-by-word” (p. 104).
I would be amiss if I did not briefly touch upon the topic of international usability and how it pertains to the field technical communication. Traditional software development differentiates between internationalization and localization. According to Nielsen (2000), “Internationalization refers to having a single design that can be used world-wide, and localization refers to making an adapted version of that design for a specific locale. Internationalization involves the use of simpler language that can be understood by non-native speakers, whereas localization often involves translation. For the Web, it will initially make most sense to internationalize sites rather than localizing them because most countries will not have enough users to make localization worthwhile” (p. 315). Furthermore, individuals from different countries are diverse. As a result, individuals from around the globe use Web sites differently. Technical communicators who design Web sites exclusively for one country will be neglecting a vast amount of Web users. Therefore, international usability must be a priority for all individuals within the field of technical communication.
Overall, the topic of Web usability is gaining attention and momentum within society; however, we still have quite a distance to travel. Furthermore, it is up to technical communicators to champion the cause of usability across all platforms. Nielsen (2000) best describes the past, present and future of Web usability by writing, “Usability used to be a suppressed and barely tolerated oddity in the computer industry. Computer companies have always refused to make usability the driving criterion in product development. Instead, features and performance were always the goals, and usability professionals ranked at the bottom of the totem pole, just barely above technical writers … So the tables have been turned, and usability has become a core competency that is necessary for business survival in the network economy. Only usable sites get any traffic. If customers can’t find a product on an e-commerce site, they are not going to buy it” (p. 388-399).
Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think! A common sense approach to web
usability (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability: The practice of simplicity.
Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.
