A few days ago, Betsy Thaggard put a question to the STC Austin mailing list:
What's your take on writing for and reading on the web? The conventional wisdom was to keep things short, that people didn't want to look at a screen for long. But now that so much of what many of us read is on a monitor, does that change the desired length of text on a page?
And what about for mobile sites: Are we still aiming for basically a sentence or two of synopsis, or do people want, and are they willing to read, entire articles or at least pieces with at least a little substance to them?
And where do tablets figure into this inexact equation?
Have The Rules changed for reading on the Web?
Well, what are The Rules, anyway?
Steve Krug pretty much laid down the law on Web writing in his classic book, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
. In fact, on page 45, he literally lays down the law:
Get rid of half the words on each page,
then get rid of half of what's left.
-- KRUG'S THIRD LAW OF USABILITY
That's pretty clear - or is it?
Actually, if you look at the rest of Don't Make Me Think, it's pretty obvious that Krug's Third Law only applies to a subset of Web content:
I'm not suggesting that the articles at Salon.com should be shorter than they are. I'm really talking about two specific kinds of writing: happy talk and instructions.
...
We all know happy talk when we see it: It's the introductory text that's supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we're about to see in the section we've just entered.
...
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, pages 45..47)
FACT OF LIFE #1:
We don't read pages. We scan them.
One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.
The exception, of course, is pages that contain documents like news stories, reports, or product descriptions. But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen.
(Krug 2006, page 22)
In my opinion, The Rules haven't changed, for the most part.
"Keep it short" applies to happy talk and instructions. Years of experience reading online text haven't made us more tolerant of fluff.
In fact, I suspect our greater sophistication about Web content has made us more aware of Krug's "sure-fire test" for happy talk:
If you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tine voice in the back of your head saying, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah..."
And at this point, most of us know how to fill out a Web form. Those who don't aren't going to read instructions, unless they're instructions for an offline task, like setting the VCR clock. OK, that's a joke - no one reads those instructions either.
The Rules haven't changed for other Web content, either. The inverted pyramid still applies to news stories, and long sales letters still have their place on the Web. Bullet points still work in product descriptions and blog posts.
Krug's Fact of Life #1 may need an update, though. Years of online reading experience, plus nicer monitors, plus better phone displays, plus pad form-factors, may equal a greater willingness to read long documents online, rather than printing them out (but Jakob Nielsen still thinks PDFs are Unfit for Human Consumption).
But what about mobile sites? Betsy aked:
Are we still aiming for basically a sentence or two of synopsis, or do people want, and are they willing to read, entire articles or at least pieces with at least a little substance to them?
I think the smaller screen real estate on mobile devices is going to continue to enforce the "keep it short" rule there. If I'm going to read a substantive article on my phone, I'm going to want to have some confidence that the article has the information I want. One way to do that would be to get to the article via a link from "a sentence or two of synopsis." So once again, I don't think the rules have changed much.
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