Writing text for links and headings
The first of Jakob Nielsen's articles about authoring web content covers research into writing links and the second points to the BBC as an exemplarly website when it comes to writing news headlines. Both are worth reading by web content authors, but we'll summarise them here.
F-pattern
In the first article Nielsen mentions the F-pattern, a pattern that describes how users read web content:
“...people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the 'F' — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text's left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list."
Best and worst links
The article continues on to give examples of good and bad links. The research was based around showing users the first 11 characters of a link and asking them to predict what they would see when clicking on the link. As explained by Nielsen, the best links:
The BBC: masters of the headline
In the second article, Nielsen praises the authors of the BBC website for consistently producing headlines which are
F-pattern
In the first article Nielsen mentions the F-pattern, a pattern that describes how users read web content:
“...people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the 'F' — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text's left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list."
Best and worst links
The article continues on to give examples of good and bad links. The research was based around showing users the first 11 characters of a link and asking them to predict what they would see when clicking on the link. As explained by Nielsen, the best links:
- Use plain language
- Use specific terminology
- Follow conventions for naming common features
- Front-load user- and action-oriented terms.
The BBC: masters of the headline
In the second article, Nielsen praises the authors of the BBC website for consistently producing headlines which are
- short (because people don't read much online);
- rich in information scent, 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'll like the full article before they click (because people don't return to sites that promise more than they deliver).
The average BBC headlines uses 5 words or 34 characters and the BBC manages to squeeze a lot of meaning into such a short space.
Links:
