Website Usability Guidelines

Writing Content Copy

Follow these usability recommendations:

Don't Use these elements:

• Complex Words - hard to understand online - promotes confusion.
• Humor - Users scan text, they may not know when you are trying to be humorous - they may take the statement as fact.
• Marketese - Hype reduces creditability.
• Clever phrases and marketing lingo.
• Redundant content will reduce the impact of your message.
• Exclamation marks - They don't belong in professional writing, and they especially don't belong on web pages. Exclamation marks look chaotic and loud - don't yell at users.
• Unusual punctuation - unusual punctuation will reduce scannability and would be annoying to visually impaired users whose audio browsers spell out the word instead of reading it as a word.
• Single-item bulleted lists.
• A lot of graphics - users like one clear graphic of the product.
• A lot of bold text - bold text should only be used in the heading. Bold text can draw the users' attention away from an important point.
• Underline words for emphasis - it looks like a hyperlink.
• Coupons - if the users do not have a coupon when checking out, they may exit your website in search of a coupon.

Use Bulleted or Numbered Lists - Lists - Bulleted or numbered lists are a great way to break the page up into brief ideas. Bulleting points makes them much more memorable than writing them together in a sentence.

Legibility

• Use the right size text for your audience.
• Moving, blinking, or zooming text is much harder to read than static words.
• Avoid the use of ALL CAPS for text. It's hard to read.
  Label sections and categories according to the value they hold for the customer.
• Spell out abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, and immediately follow them by the abbreviation in the first sentence.

Scannability - Write short non-indented paragraphs with a double space between them. The double space creates more eye-soothing white space on a page. A paragraph consisting of more than eight lines should be divided into two shorter paragraphs to improve readability.

Limit paragraphs to a single topic. Because users often stop reading paragraphs after the first sentence, be sure to begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence. Write short sentences. The longer a sentence is, the more difficult it is to read.