Web Usability and Copywriting: Making Your Visitors Feel at Home

A website is a strange beast — it is your reception area, your office, your shop, your brochure, your catalogue... And all without being able to walk into it, sit down in it, touch it. But just as you wouldn't want your customers to get lost on the way to a sales meeting in your offices, or to leave your shop in frustration because they can't find the goods they're looking for, so it is crucial that the visitors to your website can find their way around your website and get to where they want to go as easily as they can follow a sign, open a door, reach onto a shelf. The science of designing sites that work for visitors is known as usability.

Web usability has a range of different significances, depending on who you're talking to — for designers of e-commerce sites it relates to how effectively you can help visitors to buy, for engineers it is how effectively various interfaces work together - for us here it is how easily visitors can navigate around a site to find what they want, and how positively they respond to the contents of the site as shown through their actions to buy, to contact, to come back.

I am particularly grateful to Ian Graham's A Pattern Language for Web Usability, which, although no longer young in Internet terms (2003), is still a model of clarity, wit and common sense. The basic thrust of Graham's idea is that designers and developers (and here I would include copywriters) have a responsibility to create websites in which the visitor feels at ease, and where they can carry out their chosen actions and transactions straightforwardly and, ideally, more or less intuitively.  In terms of website design this means always having a Home button in the top left-hand corner of the screen, providing a top menu bar or side menus to the left of the screen, clear signaling of internal navigation links, and so on — sticking to design and architectural conventions which enable swift understanding of each page and seamless movement about the site.

What, though, does usability mean in terms of copywriting? Partly it is a question simply of employing the language which will be appropriate for the visitor — if you are selling faucets on-line you want to use direct, accessible language to enable the visitor to find the product they're looking for and purchase it with the minimum of fuss. That much is simply good copywriting, whether for web or print. Where writing for websites in particular, and electronic media in general, differs, though, is in the application of an understanding of how people read on screen, and how to make it easy for them to read comfortably.

When reading print, the competent reader tends to scan down the middle of the page, 'chunking' phrases — very few skilled adult readers read word by word. On screen, however, eye-tracking studies have shown that readers have a tendency to relate to text in a very different way. Essentially, the eyes tend to go first to the upper left of the page and to hover in that general area before dotting around to the right, back to the left and then jumping around over the page as a whole. In order, then, to provide readers with the information they need (or the messages we wish them to receive), copy needs to be presented in 'bite-sized' chunks, with the most important message, or the statement or question designed to draw them in, towards the top left of the page. Short paragraphs, boxes, bullet points, all help the reader to 'get' what you're saying easily and with the minimum of effort. That way, they can move through the words to the actions you want them to take without tripping over the furniture.