Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works

by Janice (Ginny) Redish

Overview

"Redish has done her homework and created a thorough overview of the issues in writing for the Web. Ironically, I must recommend that you read her every word so that you can find out why your customers won't read very many words on your website -- and what to do about it."

-- Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group

“There are at least twelve billion web pages out there. Twelve billion voices talking, but saying mostly nothing. If just 1% of those pages followed Ginny’s practical, clear advice, the world would be a better place. Fortunately, you can follow her advice for 100% of your own site’s pages, so pick up a copy of Letting Go of the Words and start communicating effectively today.?

--Lou Rosenfeld, co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

On the web, whether on the job or at home, we usually want to grab information and use it quickly. We go to the web to get answers to questions or to complete tasks – to gather information, reading only what we need. We are all too busy to read much on the web.

This book helps you write successfully for web users. It offers strategy, process, and tactics for creating or revising content for the web. It helps you plan, organize, write, design, and test web content that will make web users come back again and again to your site.

Learn how to create usable and useful content for the web from the master − Ginny Redish. Ginny has taught and mentored hundreds of writers, information designers, and content owners in the principles and secrets of creating web information that is easy to scan, easy to read, and easy to use.

This practical, informative book will help anyone creating web content do it better.

Features
* Clearly-explained guidelines with full color illustrations and examples from actual web sites throughout the book.
* Written in easy-to-read style with many "befores" and "afters."
* Specific guidelines for web-based press releases, legal notices, and other documents.
* Tips on making web content accessible for people with special needs.

Janice (Ginny) Redish has been helping clients and colleagues communicate clearly for more than 20 years. For the past ten years, her focus has been helping people create usable and useful web sites. She is co-author of two classic books on usability: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas), and User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos), and is the recipient of many awards.

* Clearly-explained guidelines with full color illustrations and examples from actual
web sites throughout the book.

* Written in easy-to-read style with many "befores" and "afters."

* Specific guidelines for web-based press releases, legal notices, and other documents.

* Tips on making web content accessible for people with special needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780080555386
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	06/22/2007
Series:	Interactive Technologies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	21 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Janice (Ginny) Redish has been helping clients and colleagues communicate clearly for more than 20 years. For the past ten years, her focus has been helping people create usable and useful web sites.

A linguist by training, Ginny is passionate about understanding how people think, how people read, how people use web sites - and helping clients write web content that meets web users' needs in the ways in which they work.

Ginny loves to teach and mentor - and to practice what she preaches. She turns research into practical guidelines that her clients and students can apply immediately to their web sites.

Ginny's earlier books received rave reviews for being easy to read and easy to use, as well as comprehensive and full of great advice. She is co-author of two classic books on usability:

* A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas)

* User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos)

She is also the author of the section on writing on www.usability.gov.

Ginny's work and leadership in the usability and plain language communities have earned her numerous awards, including the Rigo Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication and the Alfred N. Goldsmith Award from the IEEE Professional Communication Society.

Ginny is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication and a past member of the Board of Directors of both the Society for Technical Communication and the Usability Professionals' Association.

Read an Excerpt

Letting Go of the Words

Writing Web Content that Works

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By Janice (Ginny) Redish

MORGAN KAUFMANN PUBLISHERS

Copyright © 2007 Janice Redish
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-08-055538-6

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Chapter One

Content! Content! Content!

Yesterday, while on the web, I

• downloaded a file

• ordered a book

• compared prices on a new camera I'm thinking of buying

• read a few of my favorite blogs

• checked the Wikipedia entry for usability

• looked for information on a health topic for my elderly aunt

? What did you do on the web yesterday? Were you just browsing around without any goal or were you looking for something specific?

Most people say "something specific." They want to send a baby gift or arrange a trip. They need to reorder their favorite specialty food or download a software upgrade. They have a question about company policy or want to check the balance in their vacation account. They have a problem with one of their gadgets and think they might find help for the problem online. Or they want to see what bloggers are saying about the latest political turmoil. They have a goal in mind when they go the web.

People come to web sites for the content

People come to web sites for the content that they think (or hope) is there. They want information that

• answers a question or helps them complete a task

• is easy to find and easy to understand

• is accurate, up to date, and credible

Information = content. In this book, I'm going to use both words – "information" and "content" – to talk about the words and pictures that you and your team put on your web site.

Web users skim and scan

? Last time you were on the web, how much did you want to read? How quickly did you want to get past the home page of the site you went to?

? Did you search? How much of the search results page did you read? Did you navigate? How much did you want to read on the pathway (menu) pages you had to go through to get to the information you were looking for?

? What did you do when you got to the page where you thought the information was? Did you start to read right away? Or did you first skim and scan?

Most people skim and scan a lot on the web. They hurry through all the navigation, wanting to get to the page that has what they came for. Even on the final (destination, information) pages, most web users skim and scan before they read.

Most web users are very busy people who want to read only as much as they need to satisfy the goal that brought them to the web.

Web users read, but ...

Do people ever read on the web? Yes, of course, they do. They read links, short descriptions, and search results – but they want to read those very quickly. They read news. They read blogs. They read on topics they are interested in.

Note, however, how much of this reading is "functional." In this book, I'm not talking about novels and poetry on the web. I'm talking about information sites, e-commerce sites, blogs that are trying to be informative, and information parts of web applications and e-learning programs.

People don't come to the web to linger over the words. Most uses of the web are for gathering information or doing tasks, not for the pleasure of reading. If your busy web users lose interest or don't find the information relevant, they'll stop reading. If they can't find what they need quickly enough, they'll leave your site and go elsewhere.

And if people don't find your site useful, they are not likely to come back. The Enterpulse study in the margin note on page 2 found that "66% [of the professionals in the study] rarely – if ever – return to a site once they've had a bad experience."

They don't read more because ...

• They are too busy.

• What they find is not relevant to what they need.

• They are trying to answer a question. They want to get right to the answer and read only what they need to answer the question.

• They are trying to do a task. They want to read only what is necessary to do the task.

• They are bombarded with information and sinking under information overload.

• As Nielsen and Loranger (2006, 22) say, "If people carefully studied everything they came across online, they would never get to log off and have a life."

What makes writing for the web work well?

Good web writing

• is like a conversation

• answers people's questions

• lets people grab and go

Good web writing is like a conversation

Think of your web content as your part of a conversation – not a rambling dialogue but a focused conversation started by a very busy person.

? How often does someone come to your web site to ask a question: How do I ...? Where do I find out about ...? May I....?

In many cases, web sites are replacing phones. In many cases, the point of web content is for people to get information for themselves from your web site rather than calling.

When site visitors come with questions, you have to provide answers. When site visitors come to do a task, you have to help them through the task. But, because you aren't there in person to lead them to the right place, give them the answer, or walk them through the steps, you have to build your site to do that in your place. You have to build your side of the conversation into the site.

Good web writing answers people's questions

As we'll see in later chapters, if you think of the web as conversation, you'll realize that much of your content is meant to answer the questions that people come with. You do not want an entire site to be in a section called frequently asked questions. You do want to think about what people come wanting to know and then about how to give them that information as concisely and clearly as possible.

Good web writing lets people "grab and go"

On the web, breaking information into pieces for different users, different topics, different questions, and different needs helps web users to grab just what they need and go on to look up their next question, do their next task, make a decision, get back to work, or do whatever comes next for them. In this book, we'll look at several ways to write so that busy web users can grab and go. Figures 1-1 and 1-2 show you just one example of how we can transform traditional writing into good web writing.

Introducing Letting Go of the Words

My goal in this book is to help you provide your site visitors with high-quality content that is easy to find and easy to understand. Letting Go of the Words is about planning, selecting, organizing, writing, illustrating, reviewing, and testing content that meets people's needs – that gives them a successful and satisfying web experience.

Let's talk a bit about what this book is and what it is not, as well as about how you might work with Letting Go of the Words.

It's about writing and design, not technology

Letting Go of the Words is about strategy and tactics, not about tools. I'll help you think about the people who come to your web site and help you write so that they have a successful web experience and you have a successful web site. Technology changes too fast to be a major part of the book – and the principles of good writing for the web transcend the technology you use.

It's full of examples

I know you want examples, so I've included lots of screen shots. (It's smart to want examples; it's easier to understand a point if you can see it as well as read about it.)

In many cases, I've also shown how I might revise the web page. In consulting projects, of course, I work closely with the subject matter experts to be sure that the final writing is accurate and consistent with the web site's personality and style. Here, I've shown what I might do because I have not worked with every web site that I show in the book.

Also, web sites change. In a few cases, the site changed while I was writing the book and I've included two shots to make a point about the change. Many more of the sites in this book may have changed by the time you go to look at them. That does not invalidate what I am showing. Even old examples can make excellent learning opportunities. If you see ways to improve the web writing on your site from any of the examples in the book, the examples will have done their job.

It's based in a user-centered design process

User-centered design is a process for creating products that work well for their users. When you practice user-centered design, you focus on people: their goals, their needs, their ways of working, and their environments. User-centered design means that you are using technology to help people achieve their goals in ways that work for them.

The concepts and processes of user-centered design flow through this book. My goal is to help you develop a usable and useful web site for your audiences. When you talk to others, you may hear terms like "reader-focused writing," "usability," and "plain language." To me, those are all names for what we are striving for. They are all part of the same idea; they are all aspects of user-centered design.

You can start the process in several places

If you are revising an existing web site, you might want to start by finding out how well it works for the people whom you want to use it. The best technique for finding out how well a site works is usability testing: watching and listening while representative users try to find specific information or accomplish specific tasks with the web site.

You should not wait until the end of a project to do usability testing. In fact, usability testing is a great way to start your web project. Test early; test often; test on a small-scale, iteratively.

You can jump around in the book

A book has to be linear, but you don't have to use it that way. The path I've set up through the book is one logical way to move: from users to scenarios to home pages to pathway pages to destination pages – and then within destination pages through overall design, writing, lists and tables, headings, illustrations, and links – ending with getting from first draft to final web page.

But that may not be the most logical path for you or for your project. Feel free to jump around in the book. Read it once through quickly now and then come back to it again when you have a specific question or need.

You can join our web community

I hope that you will learn from Letting Go of the Words and that it will answer most of your questions. I would also like to continue the conversation that I'm starting in this book. Join us on the web site at www.redish.net/writingfortheweb to ask a question, voice an opinion, get information about usability testing and other topics, and share your examples.

SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 1

Here are key messages from Chapter 1:

• People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.

• They come for information, for the content.

• They don't read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.

• Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.

• They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

• Think of the web as a conversation started by a busy web user.

• Answer people's questions – throughout your web content, not only in sections called frequently asked questions.

• Write so that busy people can grab the information they need and go on to whatever they need to do next.

• Start with a usability test. Test early; test often; test on a smallscale, iteratively.

Chapter Two

People! People! People!

To create a web site that communicates well, you must think about the people you are communicating with. Understanding your audiences and what they need is critical to deciding what to write, how much to write, the vocabulary to use, and how to organize the content on your web site.

We all interpret as we read

People aren't just passive receptacles into which writers can pour information. We are all constantly interpreting what we see on the screen in light of our own experiences and expectations. Even when we think that we share the same language, it isn't entirely the same. We may not know the same words. We may have different meanings for the same words.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Letting Go of the Words by Janice (Ginny) Redish Copyright © 2007 by Janice Redish. Excerpted by permission of MORGAN KAUFMANN PUBLISHERS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

1 Content! Content! Content!
2 People! People! People!
3 Starting Well: Home Pages
4 Getting There: Pathway Pages
5 Writing Information, Not Documents
6 Giving Just the Essential Messages
7 Designing Web Pages for Ease of Use

Interlude: The New Life of Press Releases

8 Tuning Up Your Sentences
9 Using Lists and Tables
10 Breaking Up Your Text with Headings

Interlude: Legal Information Can Be Understandable, Too

11 Using Illustrations Effectively
12 Writing Meaningful Links
13 Getting From First Draft to Final Web Page

Interlude: Creating An Organic Style Guide

For More Information -- The Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The good news is you can write well; the great news is Ginny Redish can show you how to translate that to the web!

Editorial Reviews

"Redish has done her homework and created a thorough overview of the issues in writing for the Web. Ironically, I must recommend that you read her every word so that you can find out why your customers won't read very many words on your website — and what to do about it." —Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group “There are at least twelve billion web pages out there. Twelve billion voices talking, but saying mostly nothing. If just 1% of those pages followed Ginny’s practical, clear advice, the world would be a better place. Fortunately, you can follow her advice for 100% of your own site’s pages, so pick up a copy of Letting Go of the Words and start communicating effectively today.” —Lou Rosenfeld, co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

From the Publisher