TwoLittleFishes Web design blog

Inverted pyramid

People often write Web sites like they would a school science report, starting with an introduction and leaving the conclusion until the very end. Web pages should actually be more like a newspaper article, giving a brief summary of the whole story including the conclusion first and then add more details.

I think schools have a lot to answer for when it comes to poor Web site content. They encourage students to fill their essays with filler by giving minimum word counts and often the only other writing that students do is write science reports.

Most science reports start by outlining the experiment and giving information about what should happen, but doesn’t give a conclusion until the end. While this way of writing is fine for a science report, students often come away writing everything else the same. If this style is used on a Web site then it means that users have to read the whole page (or at least scroll through the whole page), to reach the conclusion. According to research done by the Nielsen Norman Group, only around 20% of users see 2 or more screens of information on each page. That means that on a page with a fair amount of information only 20% of users will see the conclusion if you leave it until the end.

Most newspaper articles on the other hand start by giving a summary of the whole story including the conclusion, then add more detail to the story as it continues. This means that almost all users will see the conclusion if they just want a simple answer and can continue reading if they want more detail. It also helps the user to know that they are in the right place as they can quickly see a summary of what the whole page is about.

Tags: Valuable content, Writing for the Web

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under Writing for the Web.