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Asma Chaudhary | B.F.A. in AVT + COMM

COMM 361 Online Journalism

Jakob Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web

Image provided by Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com

Jakob Nielsen, an expert on Web usability, discusses how readers do not read information but instead scan.

Nielsen’s approach is simple. That’s it.

He tends to make Web pages as simple and straightforward as possible. The background color is white and the text is black. There is a headlining yellow bar at the top of the page to alert users where they are and what they are reading.

According to Nielsen, “reading from a computer screen is about 25% slower than reading from a paper” and that text has an amount of scannability based on:

Be Succint! (Writing for the Web)

• Highlighted keywords such as bold or italic typefaces or by using hyperlinks
• Headings and sub-headings are important because they give clues
• Bulleted lists are easy on the eyes
• Each graf needs to fulfill one idea and not jump all over the place
• The standard inverted pyramid should be kept in mind because it provides structure that begins with the conclusion
• The word count needs to reduce in half (50%) when it comes to Internet writing

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