Fight Web A.D.D.

The computer screen is an inefficient medium for presenting text; reading speed drops by as much as 50% compared to print! To make matters worse, Web surfers have notoriously short attention spans. Some researchers assert that casual visitors to a site will leave within 9 seconds if they find nothing of interest. (Approximately the attention span of a gold fish!)

Here are five basic rules for designing Websites that will keep your visitors’ attention:

Get to the point. Plan before developing. Know who your visitors are and what you want them to do as a result of visiting your site. Present vital information clearly, briefly, immediately. Do not make visitors “drill down” through more than one link in order to find what they are looking for. Think carefully about the real value of using expensive Flash introductions that really only delay your visitor’s experience of the true content of your site.

Use chunking. If you must create long text pages, break the text into short paragraphs. Use informative headings to assist navigation, and employ lists to convey main points.

Use readable fonts. In my technical writing courses I used to extol the virtues of serif fonts like Times Roman to enhance print readability. The same does not hold true for on-screen readability. Stick with sans serif fonts like Arial or Verdana. Moreover, do not load your page with a variety of font sizes. Two or three should suffice. Finally, use color judiciously. Stay away from bright colors, and never use flashing text!

Use graphics for two reasons: They convey information much more efficiently, and, they look even better on-screen than in print! Wed graphics with text. Use captions or other text references to your graphics. Do not make your visitors puzzle over why a graphic element is there, unless, of course, that is your purpose.

Design your page with an awareness of how people scan for information on-screen. Research shows that Western readers focus first on the upper left-hand corner of the page, then scan quickly to the right, then left and down. The screen example on the left illustrates eye movement (red arrows) and eye dwell (“hot spots”) for a typical Web page. The green dotted line shows eye travel for an uninteresting page. Next stop: the Back button!

Does that mean you should always put the most important information in the top, left-hand corner? Perhaps. But, given that visitors begin by looking there anyway, maybe you want to place a compelling element farther down, in order to draw the eye into the page.

Here, I will use the time-honored dictum: “Know Your User.”