PureGin.org

Much work remains to fully understand the best way of writing for the Web. In our Study 3, we treated the three variations (concise, scannable, and objective) as dichotomies, whereas to a writer, they are continuous dimensions. A simple follow-on study would vary each of our dimensions in a number of steps to assess the shape of the usability curve. For example, conciseness could be tested with word counts varying in 10% increments from 10% to 90% of the control condition. Similarly, scannability could be tested with fewer or more headings, with no bulleted lists, and with more or less use of highlighted words, background coloring, pullquotes, and other typographic tricks. We welcome any such additional studies, and to facilitate them we have made our original test pages and the complete set of test questions available for download at this URL:
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/studyfiles

It will also be necessary to study a range of tasks and types of websites, including larger and more complex hypertext structures than the one used in our study.

We identified many issues in Study 2 that were not tested in Study 3. Some of the more important ones are:

• interplay between humor and personality on the one side and objectivity on the other
• ways of integrating informational graphics with the text
• best use of within-page and across-page overviews and summaries
• how to structure text into multiple pages, using hypertext to relegate less important information to secondary pages
• how to promote an impression of credibility.

Finally, future studies should address the connection between Web writing and the main Web usability issues of navigation and task performance. Concise text implies shorter pages which will download faster and alleviate the Web's most serious usability problem, slow response times, thus helping users remember their navigational state.