Tips

On Brevity

Scan On!

Background:

Use highlighting and emphasis to make important words catch the user’s eye.  Colored text can also be used for emphasis and hypertext anchors stand out by virtue of being blue and underlined.

—Nielsen (1997b)

Emphasize small, important words.

—Horton (1990)

Databases spawn Web pages in two ways. The old-fashioned way is that the database spits out a report in ASCII, and the user reformats that report in HTML, and posts it on the site. More recently, databases have begun to be able to turn out reports in HTML itself. But the information in such a page is only as good as your last report. It is static.

Better are pages built on the fly. In this scenario, the Web page sends a request to the database, and the database pours the latest data into the correct template, then the browser displays that brand-new page. You can see that in the second scenario, you do less work, once you get the delicate communication set up between your Web pages and the database. That’s where our new database comes in handy.

Revised Paragraphs:

Databases spawn Web pages in two ways. The old-fashioned way is that the database spits out a report in ASCII, and the user reformats that report in HTML, and posts it on the site. More recently, databases have begun to be able to turn out reports in HTML itself. But the information in such a page is only as good as your last report. It is static.

Better are pages built on the fly. In this scenario, the Web page sends a request to the database, and the database pours the latest data into the correct template, then the browser displays that brand-new page. You can see that in the second scenario, you do less work, once you get the delicate communication set up between your Web pages and the database. That’s where our new database comes in handy.

Challenge: Highlight key phrases.

We all solve problems, but most of us have a hard time explaining how we do it. The Gestalt psychologists argue that when we work on solving a problem we struggle to relate each component of the situation to all the other components. We reach for a structural understanding. We start with a goal in mind, and we reorganize the elements of the problem situation in a new way so that they allow us to reach our goal, thus "solving" the problem.

Because the Gestaltists emphasize organizing as a way of thinking, their work dovetails nicely with the work of their fellow Gestaltists on perception. Gestalt perception studies argue that perceiving is an activity in which the mind imposes an orderly structure on the rush of incoming stimuli. Arnheim’s book Visual Thinking popularized this approach. You might say that in the Gestaltist view, we reorganize what we see in front of us, mentally or physically, until we see what we want—an orderly structure that may draw us closer to our goals.

See: Morkes & Nielsen (1997, 1998), Nielsen (1997a, 1997b)

• Create a title that means something! (October 1, 1998)

• Insert more headlines and subheads.(October 15, 1998)

• Turn any list into a bulleted or numbered list. (November 15, 1998)

• Design each paragraph around one idea. (December 1, 1998)

• Put the idea of the paragraph first. (December 15, 1998)