TwoLittleFishes Web design blog

Bulleted lists and numbered steps

Giving people lists of things or numbered steps help break information into bite size chunks that can be easily digested. It also helps to break up large walls of text and provide white space.

Bite size chunks

Using lists can help break up content into chunks that are easier to understand and remember. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen shows that using lists can improve readability by 47%.

Using lists helps to highlight important information and so helps people complete tasks more quickly and accurately.

Creating readable lists

Start a list with a leading sentence fragment that each of the items in the list complete.

e.g.

Some of the ways to make your Web site more readable are using:

• highlighted key words and phrases,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• concise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• inverted pyramid style.

Make sure the first words in each list item are important information carrying words. Try not to include duplicate words at the beginning of multiple lines or begin lines with filler words like “an” or “a”.

It may be worth writing all of the list items you want first and then write the leading sentence to include those items without filler text. You’ll probably then need to change the list items too to make sense.

Don’t overuse lists though, if your page is filled of lists that each have only 2 items you’ve probably taken it too far.

Numbered steps

Numbered steps are a great way of providing instructions. It’s easy to keep track of where you are with numbered steps to carry out a task like baking a cake or finding a pub.

Try to break the steps down into individual smaller tasks that are easy to do.

This might be a good way of making a task that seems difficult into a more manageable one.

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Tags: Highlighting text, Writing for the Web

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Writing for the Web.