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Home > Guidelines > 2. Make text scannable. |
To make text scannable:
2a. Create a
meaningful
2b. Insert
meaningful |
2. Make text scannable.
Why be scannable? No one wants to read much onscreen. On the Web, people use little pieces of text--microcontent-- to decide whether to read the whole page. They look at major signposts, such as titles, headlines, boldfaced terms, to see if the content is, more or less, what they want. They scan your page to avoid reading. Or at least to postpone reading. Making your text easy to scan invites people in, gives them an overview of the content, orients them. And if they do decide to settle in and read, the signposts have given them a mental model of the content. |
Resources Taking a Position on Scannability Heuristic Online Text (HOT) Evaluation for Scannability Making text scannable (Hot Text module, PDF, 652K, or about 12 minutes at 56K)
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