One particular point of pride for us here at DLB is the fact that we post on BlogLESS six days a week, and we simultaneously manage to keep it valid.

For the most part, once you've mentally committed to valid HTML, this kind of feat rarely causes a problem. However, for a very brief moment this fine Wednesday, I thought I'd share with you three fairly non-intuitive things that we've run into that caused us validation errors, and what you can do to prevent them.

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How do we read online? It’s a good question for designers to ask when blogging or creating content for a website. Since a monitor is obviously not like the printed page, we need to be careful not to make assumptions based on former reading (and writing) habits and figure out how best to take advantage of the medium.

Over the summer, Michael Agger wrote a tidy little piece about the topic, paraphrasing the work of usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, who used eye-tracking studies and other experiments to determine how we read online.

Nielsen says that users are “selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” When they arrive at a page, they are not prepared to read it. They scan it for information and if they don’t see what they need, they leave.

To summarize his suggestions, writing online should address:

Scannability

Make it easy for users to get into the piece and get out if they need to.

• One idea per paragraph (users skip large blocks of text)
• Highlighted keywords (prevents skimming)
• Meaningful sub-headings
• Bulleted lists
• The inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• Use half the word count of conventional writing

To this, I would add: Graphics are another good way to help users scan. Consider having at least one image to anchor every piece. I don’t have any data to back this up, but pages without pictures are extremely boring.

This image makes it easier to see what Nielsen is talking about.
Ironically, he is famous for having very few graphics on his site.

Credibility

Writing that contains hyperlinks carries greater authority. Users consider this when judging whether to stick with a site or move on to another.

Don’t use links in lieu of explanations. Do use them to verify claims.

Simplicity

“Promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts.”

More simply: Readers prefer facts, not filtering through market-speak.

Conclusion

These lessons may seem obvious, but I don’t think anyone begins writing this way naturally, so it’s a helpful list to have. Content is king, but we can all stand to make our writing a little more usable.

Last month, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University put out a new eye-tracking study, focused on differences in eye-movement patterns between single- and two-column web pages.

For some reason, I always read these, and inevitably end up frustrated. Not just because of the standard objections to eye-tracking as a useful methodology, but because out of the 20 of them I've read, it feels like numbers 2-20 haven't added anything substantive – or, more importantly, generalizable – to the information I got in the first one, which taught me about the "F"-shaped eye pattern (later popularized as the "golden triangle").

So this time, I was determined to review some of the secondary literature on these studies (in the form of scanning the first page of Google's search results [note to self: touché]), and see if I could generalize the lessons of eye-tracking studies for myself and people like me.

And when I say generalize, I don't mean come up with a Smashing magazine list of "The Top 276 Things Designers Can Learn from Eye-Tracking Studies" that basically recapitulates the bullet points of all the harvested literature verbatim. I'm talking about getting this down to a set of rules of thumb you can write on the back of a business card.

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