PureGin.org

Our study suggests that scannable, concise, and objective writing styles each make a positive difference in Web users' performance and subjective satisfaction. Promotional writing, which is the style most commonly found on the Web today, had much lower scores on virtually all usability measures.

The good results for the objective language condition may be because it might be easier to process objectively written text than promotional text. Web users wonder about credibility, and questioning the credibility of promotional statements may distract users from processing the meaning.

Since there is no inherent conflict between concise, scannable, and objective texts, we recommend that Web authors employ all three principles in their writing. Indeed, in our case study the combined effect of employing all three improvements was much larger than any of the individual improvements taken alone: our combined version recorded a 124% improvement in measured usability, whereas the three individual improvements "only" scored from 27% to 58%.

In one of our other projects [Morkes and Nielsen, 1998], we rewrote actual pages from Sun's website according to our guidelines. In addition to making them concise, scannable, and objective, we also split them into more pages, using hypertext links to move less important material from top-level pages to secondary pages, thus making the primary pages even shorter. The rewritten pages scored 159% higher than the originals in a set of usability metrics much like the ones used in the present study.

We thus have data from two studies where measured usability improved by 124% and 159%, respectively, when rewriting the text according to our guidelines. More research is obviously needed to get additional data about when one can expect what magnitude of usability improvements, but our current data does suggest that it will often be possible to more than double usability by rewriting web pages according to our guidelines. The ability to double usability should come as no big surprise since it is about what is found in traditional usability engineering of software: applying established usability methods [Nielsen, 1994a] to a software product that was developed without any usability input typically doubles the usability of the redesigned product.