It’s cheaper when customers use the website

If you can replace a customer phone call with a visit to your website, you’re going to save money. In the UK, it’s on average 14 times more expensive to take a phone call compared to having your customer visit your website.

Having said that, your website is just one part of the overall customer experience. Providing a good customer experience involves giving your customers what they want. So when they want your phone number, just give it to them.

We’re getting wise to poor customer service

As customers, we’ve all experienced poor customer service from companies who are trying to keep costs down by ignoring us. So some of us will do a bit of digging before we buy from a company. It’s all very well having your sales number emblazoned on the homepage. But what about the customer service number? What’s it going to be like after I’ve decided to buy?

In usability tests, I’ve noticed some people go digging for the customer service number before buying. Some even say they call these numbers, just to see what the service is going to be like. They also want to know if it’s a freephone or a local rates number.

This behaviour is a reaction to past experiences of poor customer service. The approach you take to being contacted on your website will say a lot about you to prospective customers.

When these people encounter a website that hides its contact details, they know that the customer service will be practically non-existent. So they don’t buy.

Finding contact details

People tend to look for a link that says that ‘Contact us’ when they want to phone or email the company. They’ve become used to the the contact page having this name, so this is what they look for.

This has implications when you provide your telephone number at the top of the page. The example below shows how the Talk Talk website provides its phone number.

I’ve witnessed a lot of people overlooking numbers like this in their search for the word ‘contact’. Of course, other people will notice it quite quickly. So you should never rely on this approach alone. Make sure you also provide a contact page. Thankfully, this is exactly what Talk Talk do.

Avoid the ‘Don’t contact us’ page

The contact page below from Scottish Power is an example of what I call a ‘Don’t contact us’ page. Scottish Power clearly doesn’t want to speak to its customers. We’re shoved towards an online help instead.

This page tells us a lot about the company’s approach to customer service. The link to an email contact opens a 2-page contact form that asks for every possible scrap of information about you that they can think to ask.

Hiding the phone number

A less extreme version of the ‘Don’t contact us’ page is when the contact details are smothered by alternatives to contacting the organisation. Tiscali uses such a tactic, as you can see below.

The ‘Contact us’ page here is swamped with alternatives to calling. If you want to call them, you need to find the ‘Contact us’ link on this page. Despite already being on a page of the same name. There’s nothing wrong with providing a few alternatives but these should not prevent the user from finding the contact details.

BT handles this a little better as shown below. The way the frequently asked questions are provided here is good. Unfortunately, the user experience goes down hill rapidly after this page.

BT presents the top 3 questions to the right-hand-side of the contact options.  People who have exactly these questions, may read them and perhaps no longer need to call. Importantly, the alternatives don’t smother the main purpose of the page.

Positioning of contact options

On many websites, the phone number will be the preferred contact option for users. Some organisations however, prefer you to fill out a contact form. So they put this first and hide the number lower down the page.

When you put your contact form first, you’ll find that many people don’t get to see your phone number. We’re now very used to websites without phone numbers. So much so, that lots of people hit the Back button as soon as they see the dreaded contact form.

If you want your users to contact you at all, give their favoured options prominence on the contact page.

Contextual phone numbers

On some websites, presenting the phone number at the right moment will make the difference between getting a sale and losing one. In such circumstances, it’s not enough to simply provide the ability to find contact details. Instead the phone number should be presented contextually.

A lot of people research products on the internet but prefer to buy over the phone. If you want their business, you shouldn’t make it difficult for them to find your phone number. Consider providing your contact details contextually at points when they are likely to be useful. See the example below from the Share Centre.

The Share Centre associates the phone number with the call-to-action button by positioning the number alongside it and making the text the same colour. So people who don’t want to open an account online are presented with an alternative without the need to go looking for a number. This should lead to more calls from new customers.

Did you find this useful?

If this article was useful for you, try reading a few more. Here are a few suggestions.

• FAQ usability
• Good pathway pages
• Good call-to-action buttons

Do you even need them?

All too often FAQs are used as an attempt to patch up flaws in bad content. Before you create an FAQ page, ask yourself why they should exist at all.

Your FAQs should support the site content, not repeat it. If your FAQ page is answering questions that the rest of the website should answer, then you have a problem with your site content. Sticking up an FAQ page is not an adequate solution.

People rarely go looking for the FAQs

The naming and positioning of your FAQs is what will make them findable. People rarely go looking for the FAQs (although some will), so they often need to stumble upon them instead.

Avoid saying FAQ

I use the term FAQ here because I assume that you are involved in making websites. You know what FAQ means, but normal people (who don’t spend their lives talking about websites) are a lot less likely to have encountered the term. Some have and some haven’t.

Avoid using the initialism FAQ on your site. Saying ‘Frequently asked questions’  or ‘Common questions’ is a lot clearer.

Exposing some questions

An even better way of making the FAQs findable is to expose a few of the most popular and link to the full set. The example below comes from the Eurosport Player.

The most common questions are revealed, so they act as triggers for users who have a question before subscribing to the service. The FAQs don’t support the content here. They are the content. All you can do is log-in, subscribe or read the FAQs. It’s an approach that works for this site. However the implementation beyond this screen is pretty gruesome.

Don’t hide them

If you hide your FAQs in some dark and dusty corner of your website, they may as well not be there. This isn’t to say that you need to prioritise them within your design. Just choose pertinent places to provide them where they will be helpful.

Your contact page is a good place to introduce the availability of your FAQs. If a user is looking for your phone number to ask a question, you can save money by answering it before they pick up the phone. Just don’t substitute your phone number with FAQs. By doing so, you’re telling your customers that you don’t want to talk to them.

They’re FAQs not QWWPTAs

A common problem with FAQs is that they are often not the most frequently asked questions. Instead they are the questions that the organisation would like you to ask (Questions We Want People To Ask). My advice is to actually track the questions that people are asking. So they truly are the ones most frequently asked.

If you have a customer service number, you should record the frequency of questions that people ask. If you can answer these questions clearly on your website then you’re likely to get less people calling you. This approach can also be applied to emailed questions.

When you are tracking these questions, you should also consider the best way to provide the answer on your website. Much of the time FAQs will not be the answer. If people are asking questions like ‘How much does it cost?’ then you have a problem with your website that FAQs are not the solution to. You may need to improve the rest of the content instead.

Writing the questions

You can help your users find the question they need by writing the questions the way your user would ask them. If you are tracking the questions that people ask then this is easy. If you aren’t, you should still write the questions in a way that the user would ask.

Here is an example. The FAQs page from the Eurosport Player includes the question ‘What is the required configuration?’ Unless they’re Mr Spock from Star Trek, nobody will ask the question like this. The answer may be the same, but their question is more likely to be ‘Will it work on my computer?’ So this is wording that should be used on the FAQ.

Writing the answers

It’s the brevity of FAQs that make them useful. People can access a straight answer to a simple question. Bare this in mind when writing the answers to your FAQs. Answer the question as quickly as possible before following up with any exceptions, conditions, or explanations. So if the answer to the question is yes, then the first word of the answer you write should be ‘yes’.

This example above from the National Galleries of Scotland website answers the question immediately. It then goes on to provide the reasons for the answer.

Finding questions quickly

Remember that your users will usually have only 1 question they need to answer. They don’t want to read through every question. Instead they want to quickly zone in on the one they need. You can help them to do this by presenting the questions in a way that makes them easy to find.

Hide the answers until they’re needed

One way of doing this is to hide the answers until the user has requested the one they want. It’s easier to choose from a list of questions than a list of questions with answers below them. There are a number of ways of handling this. But the most basic is to provide the questions as a list of bookmark links to answers lower down the page.

Break up long lists of questions

The questions themselves can be difficult to skim through. This is because they tend to begin with the same words. So it becomes hard to quickly identify the one you need. Long lists of questions will be easier to skim if they are broken up into groups. You can do this by putting the groups on separate pages or just breaking them up with sub-headers.

When the question isn’t there

You won’t be able to cover every possible question. So remember to provide options for people who have questions that are still unanswered.

Was this post helpful?

If so you might also like to read:

• Short and simple sentences
• Don’t say ‘click here’ on link text
• Let your hyperlinks shine

I want to help you to identify pathway pages and explain some considerations you should make by discussing real examples.

So what’s a pathway page then?

Pathway pages are pages that your users experience on their way to finding the information they need. Let’s say I visit the website of the NatWest bank and I’m looking for car insurance. I select ‘Insurance’ from the menu and arrive at the page pictured below.

This is a pathway page. Its job is to be the parent page of the different insurance products (the child pages). The page should point me to the insurance product I want without fuss. In this example, it’s fairly obvious where I need to go to find car insurance. I don’t need to do a lot of reading in order to find it.

Pathway pages are navigation

Think of pathway pages as navigation. When we’re on a pathway page, we’re still on the journey to the content we need. We don’t want to read, we just want to find the link and move on.

Hyperlinks are the key to good pathway pages, not passages of text. Any text you use should help your users choose the correct link.

Good pathway pages are better than navigation menus

A good pathway page answers a simple question. “What’s in this section?“. This is as much about telling people they’re in the wrong section of the site as it is about telling them they are in the correct section.

In reality, navigation menus are often ignored in favour of links within the content area of the page. So the design of your pathway page can be very important to the effectiveness of your site.

In some cases, your pathway pages can actually replace a navigation menu altogether. Check out the example below from Transport for London.

This page doesn’t have a secondary menu at all. Instead it uses a pathway page to deliver links to child and grand-child pages. In this example, it allows the site to improve potentially complex user journeys by providing a simplified design.

Dealing with introductions

When you feel an introduction to the subject is required, consider creating a separate introduction page. This allows you to devote the pathway to navigation.

Such an approach is demonstrated by the Business Link website, as pictured above. This website gives people advice about starting-up and running businesses. The page above is the main page on Value Added Tax (VAT).

It has no introductory text on the subject. Instead it provides a link to an introduction for those who need it. This allows the page to fulfil its role as a pathway page, while still providing an introduction.

Linked headings

If you’re using linked headings on your pathway pages, make sure they look like links. Otherwise they might be ignored. The image below from the NatWest insurance page shows an example of such a problem. The heading ‘Essentials Contents Insurance’ is the same colour as normal text. It’s just bigger and bold. It looks like a heading, but not a link.

NatWest is obviously aware of this problem because they have repeated the link below the text. It has sacrificed a little simplicity in order to adhere to the site’s style guidelines.

The Business Link page does a better job of the same approach. There is no need to repeat links here. The headings are obviously links.

Dealing with lots of links

When your site is a little bigger, you often have pathway pages linking to more pathway pages. So instead of an explanation, you can provide some deeper links to important ‘grand-child’ pages. Here’s an example of how to do it badly, from the Scottish Government.

The design of this page lacks discipline and is difficult to read. It’s unnecessary to provide all of the links underneath each section.

Showing a selection of links

The example below from Direct.gov shows how the Scottish Government should be doing it. If you can’t feasibly show all of your lower-level links below each heading, then don’t try. Instead show just a few as an example and make it obvious there are more available.

Direct.gov gives priority to the heading links. Only 3 examples are provided below each heading and the dots indicate that the list is truncated.

These examples are hyperlinks, but  they look like normal text. This makes them more readable and also gives prominence to the headings. Their primary role is to act as examples, the fact that they are hyperlinks is a bonus.

When you can show all of your links

When you have only a few lower level links under each section, you can show them all on the same page. The example below is from the Barclays website. Barclays makes it obvious where the links are.

When you list the lower level links in this way, people assume that this is all of the available links under each section. So you should only take this approach when you can provide all of the links. When you can’t, the Direct.gov approach is more effective.

Did you find this useful?

If you found this article useful or if you want to tell me I’m wrong, please leave a comment using the form below. You might also be interested in the following posts:

• What is this site for?
• The increasing importance of usability in e-commerce
• Short and simple sentences

You can also subscribe to me RSS feed if you haven’t already.

1. Stick to what you know

Your post will be a lot more interesting if you actually know the subject you’re writing about. 10 tips posts are often just a poor regurgitation of a number of other blog posts from elsewhere. The lack of knowledge shown by the author can be pretty obvious.

You don’t need to produce revolutionary ideas to justify the post. We all have different skill sets and there are lots of people who don’t know what you know. So write about it.

2. Put the most interesting tips at the top

The tips at the top will get more attention than those lower down the page. So put the most interesting ones first.

Some people will arrive at your post with the sole purpose of commenting on it. They may read a few of your tips and then just scroll down to find your comments form. Others will have a quick look and leave if nothing grabs their interest.

Lead with your most interesting tips and you’re more likely to convert some skimmers into readers.

3. Use short and simple sentences

Write short and simple sentences. Lots of people will be skimming through the article. So the more complex your sentences are, the more likely they are too miss your point.

As well as this, avoid using complex words and sentences in an attempt to add credibility to your argument. If you write like somebody trying to sound clever, you’ll just sound like an idiot.

At the same time though, you don’t want your post to be too dry. So add a few words here and there that communicate your personality.

4. Front-load your paragraphs

Try to make your basic point in the first sentence of the first paragraph of each tip. Then follow your main point with your supporting argument. This is called front-loading.

Some of your readers will only read the first few words of each paragraph. If they can’t tell what you’re trying to say immediately, they might skip past the paragraph entirely.

5. Keep it brief

Be careful not to write too much about each tip. Part of the reason this type of article is popular is because people don’t have time to read a thesis on the subject.

If the subject of the tip is too detailed to get across in a couple of short paragraphs, it’s probably worthy of it’s own blog post. Write a post about that subject first and then link to it when you publish your tips article.

This will let you publish 2 good posts and keep your 10 tips article punchy.

6. Write your tips as sub-headers first

Start by writing the sub-headers for all of your tips. You can then just write the detail underneath each sub-heading.

Sub-headers are navigation. They help people navigate through the page by finding the points that interest them. So your reader should be able to understand the tip just by reading the sub-header.

Provide descriptive sub-headings instead of clever ones and people are more likely to read on to get more detail.

7. Use bold text to help people skim

Bold text can help you to support your argument quickly and effectively. With the tip itself as your sub-header, you can embolden a few words that sum up your reasoning. So the gist of your tip can be understood at a glance. This helps people skim through your article.

But remember, bold text works because it contrasts with normal text. If you use it too much, there’s no contrast and it doesn’t work.

8. Leave it to rest for a while, then edit it

Let your post rest for a while before coming back to it. You’ll notice bits you’re not happy with. You’ll also notice your vanity sentences. These sentences exist because you liked writing them, rather than because they’re useful.

After a day or two you’ll notice these vanity sentences and realise they’re unnecessary.

9. Don’t put tips in just to make up the numbers

If you’ve only got 7 tips, don’t rummage around the web for 3 more, just to reach 10. You’re likely to weaken the credibility of your post.

A single lame tip can leave your reader with the impression that you’re not a reliable source. When they get this impression, they are less likely to share your article with others.

10. Er…don’t eat yellow snow

OK, you got me. I don’t have a tenth one.

Enjoy this post?

If so, you can read some of my other blog posts. They aren’t numbered, but they’re full of good advice. Here’s a few suggestions:

• Twitter, Tweetdeck and simplicity
• Learn to like the Back button
• Writing numbers

You can also subscribe to me RSS feed if you haven’t already.

Your links should be obvious

In a previous post I advised you to let your hyperlinks shine. This is because your links should be obviously visible on the page. When we’re looking at a web page, we shouldn’t need to guess if text is linked or not  We also shouldn’t need to spend a lot of  effort seeking out our options.

If links are obvious, we don’t need to be told that we can click them. It’s just patronising.

It’s not a call-to-action

Defenders of ‘click here’ links argue that it’s a call-to-action and these are good. Calls-to-action can be helpful, but ‘click here’ isn’t a good call-to-action. Here are some good examples of calls-to-action:

• Get a quote
• Open an account
• Sign-up now

They are good because they tell us why we should click them. ‘Click here’ is an operational instruction rather than a call-to-action.

It doesn’t tell us where we’re going?

We often read link text on websites without reading any of the text around it. If we’re on a page and we’re just looking for the link we need, we ignore everything that isn’t a link. So ‘Click here’ tells us nothing. If the link we’re looking for says ‘click here’ instead of ‘get a quote’ we might never click it.

It smothers trigger words

So if ‘click here’ on its own is bad, what about ‘click here to get a quote’ or whatever? Well, this is slightly better. At least the text tells us what the link does. We know where we’re going to go if we click it. But finding it on the page could be easier.

The words ‘click here to’ are smothering your trigger words. When we’re scanning a page for links, it takes longer to recognise a link when the helpful words are at the back. If lots of links begin with ‘Click here’ then it can be very difficult to find the link we want.

Good link text is front-loaded, so the most important words are at the front. This makes the link easier to find.

Banner ads

I’ve heard talk that the words ‘click here’ have been statistically proven to increase click-through rates in banner advertisements. I can’t comment on this because it’s not really part of my expertise. It might be true. However nobody has ever been able to show me the research itself. If you know where this research exists, please put a link to it in the comments for this article.

What do you think?

Am I wrong or do you agree with me? Whatever your opinion, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Write a long sentence first

It’s often quicker and easier to write the sentence as you normally would and then change it after you’ve finished. Look for commas, semi colons and instances of the word “which” as opportunities to begin a new sentence.

You will rarely need to use more than one or two commas in a sentence. Have a go at splitting your sentence in two if you find you’ve got more than two commas in it. You might need to reword it a little.

It’s not always possible

Sometimes your sentence will need to be longer than 20 words. If so that’s fine. As long as you’re trying to keep your sentences short then you’ll be making a big difference.

Do this so as to not write badly

When people try to sound intellectual, they often use the term “as to” when something like “of” would be better. Using “as to” often complicates the sentence unnecessarily. It’s not just an extra word that’s the problem. An extra word won’t make a massive difference. The problem is caused by the extra thought required to translate the sentence back into plain English. Here’s an example:

The results should be clearly structured with a relevant title and also a brief description as to what is contained in the listing…

Yes very clever, but the following sentence is easier to read:

The results should be clearly structured with a relevant title and a brief description of what is contained in the listing…

All I did was remove the word “also” and replaced “as to” for “of”. I haven’t dumbed this sentence down at all. I just made it easier to read and understand.

Favour simple over short

Don’t make your sentences complicated just so that you can lose a few words. A long simple sentence will often be easier to read than a shorter complex one.

Did you find this useful?

If so, you might like to read:

• Trigger words versus Customer Carewords
• Sub-headers are navigation
• Is it web writing or just good writing?

Try it out for yourself. Go to the Wikipedia page on Tigers and find the approximate number of cubs in a litter. It’s quite difficult to find because the page is big. But now try to find the average number of hunts a tiger makes before it tends to get a kill. It’s even harder because the figure is written as a word and you’re scanning the page for a number.

Phone numbers

You can improve the findability of phone numbers even further by making them bold.

What are quick tips?

My quick tips are bits of advice I’ve given lots of times, but they’re not really worth writing a big article about.

The importance of vocabulary

It’s important to use the same words as your users on your website. They often use different words from you and probably recognise a fraction of the terms and abbreviations you use on a daily basis.

This is not only important for writing passages of text but also for way finding on your site. Good links and headers use the same words that users are thinking when they need to use them. Trigger words and Customer Carewords are based on this fact. “Words drive action” as Gerry McGovern puts it.

Trigger words

In 2004 Jared Spool wrote about trigger words. He argued that users were more likely to find what they are looking for when a site used exactly the same words they use to describe their goals. These words trigger a response because they match the words in users’ heads.

Finding your site’s trigger words

Trigger words can be found by talking to users. One suggestion Jared made was to find trigger words during usability testing. You can identify them by asking target users to describe their needs and goals before they have seen the website. You can then compare the words they use to the equivalents used on the website.

You can also use your search logs to find trigger words. Spool found that in tests, people were more likely to use site search when the website did not use the trigger words. When they used site search they typed the same trigger words they had mentioned before they had seen the site.

Customer Carewords

Gerry McGovern discusses Customer Carewords in his book Killer Web Content. (It’s a good book but the formatting of the text makes it difficult to read in places.) Customer Carewords is Gerry McGovern’s methodology for finding two things:

• The things that are most important to a website’s users.
• The words they use to describe those things.

The methodology for doing this is fairly simple. Create a long list of potential carewords and ask lots of your target users to choose the ten things that are most important to them. OK it’s slightly more involved than this. But I need to condense an entire chapter into one sentence. The list you provide them with contains lots of alternative terms for the same things. So you could have a hundred or so items in total.

In your results you find that a small number of potential carewords are chosen far more frequently than the other words. McGovern argues that 5% of your website delivers 25% of it’s value. This 5% surfaces in the Customer Carewords methodology and he calls it the ‘Long Neck’.

So what’s the difference?

The first difference between the two concepts is that trigger words do not help you prioritise, they just give you the correct words to use. However this isn’t what I’m trying to compare. I’m sure Jared Spool understands task priorities and uses other techniques to find them. I want to compare carewords to the trigger words.

User-generated versus user-selected

For me the trigger words are slightly stronger than the carewords. This is because they are generated by the user. They are found by inspecting search logs or through open discussion during usability tests. The words are a by-product of a conversation or a site search. No suggestions are made and the user is unaffected by the fact that you are noting the words they use. They don’t know it’s happening.

Customer Carewords however are selected from a list of pre-defined terms. I think that this can have an impact on the words chosen. McGovern himself admits as much in his book. In one study he carried out on a travel site, ‘special offers’ received twice as high a score as ‘deals’. So by his methodology ‘special offers’ was the strongest careword. However he found that there were 76,238 internet searches made monthly in the U.S. for ‘vacation deals’ or ‘travel deals’. In the same period there were just 46 searches for ‘vacation special offers’ or ‘travel special offers’.

It seems to me that if you place importance on the words by specifically asking for them, you influence the results. In a discussion, the respondents from McGovern’s study may have innocently said ‘deals’ numerous times. But when asked to choose a word, they chose ‘special offers’. So ‘deals’ is the trigger word and ‘special offers’ are the carewords.

So why did this happen? McGovern’s response is “the words people search with may not always be those they like to see when they visit a website“. This is based on the actual respondents’ justifications for their actions. My opinion is that their own justification can be biased by ego.

Interestingly McGovern leaves this question unanswered. He doesn’t say which option was the one he took. Perhaps he chose the trigger word?

Customer Care Trigger Words

I think you can merge both exercises and just prioritise the words that users provide spontaneously. So you override carewords that are contradicted by trigger words.

Carrying out Gerry McGovern’s Customer Carewords methodology will help you find out what’s important on your website. You can then cross-check your customer carewords against their trigger word equivelants. Check your search logs and note the words that usability testing participants use by interviewing them before they see the website. If the trigger words don’t match the carewords then use the trigger words.

Doing so will let you know what information your users prioritise. You’ll also be able to use their vocabulary when providing it.

Sub-headers help users decide whether to stay

Your web pages will not be read word for word. In many cases your user is looking for a single piece of information. He’s actually still navigating. If he sees a page of text without sub-headers he may do one of three things:

• If he’s on the right page he might:
  • spend longer than necessary trying to find the information he needs
  • lose the scent, decide he’s on the wrong page and leave.
• If he’s on the wrong page he might take a long time working this out.

Sub-headers will help him make quick decisions in all three of these cases.

A good sub-header describes the text below it

A page with well-named sub-headers will help users find the paragraph they need. This is because they summarise the text below them. So a user scanning the page will quickly read the sub-headers and stop at the one they need. Either this or they quickly realise the page does not have what they need.

Sub-headers help screen readers

Screen readers like JAWS allow their user the ability to navigate through a page via the identified headers in the HTML. In these instances your sub-headers literally are navigation. People using such software will have a better experience if you spend some time thinking about your sub-headers.

It’s also a good reason for using the proper HTML code for your headers.

Try writing your sub-headers first

A good way to focus your writing is to jot down the key questions your user has when reading the page. You can then use these questions as sub-headers and then write your copy underneath each. If you begin to stray off the topic of the sub-header then it might be unnecessary text. Consider removing it or writing another sub-heading.

Improve further with bold text

You can make your paragraph even easier to understand by using bold text on the important words within the paragraph. This way your user can find the answer to their question even more easily.

Why do people write so funny?

Many business documents are badly written. I’m not talking about badly placed apostrophes or the odd typo. I’m talking about the kind of language that is used in them. The worst culprits are official documents like tender briefs or the terms of reference for a project. They use a deliberately complex method of forming sentences and often use words that involved the use of a thesaurus.

Writing in this manner is supposed to add credibility to the document. But it doesn’t. Writing like this makes you sound stupid. Like someone trying to sound clever rather than someone who actually knows what they are talking about. You may think that the only harm you’re doing is to your office cred, but you’re wrong. Bad writing is a drain on business efficiency. Here’s an example of what I mean.

“The principal aim of the project is to create efficiencies via the identification and rationalisation of process flows in order to further increase the company’s competitive advantage.”

In plain English this could be:

“The aim of the project is to cut costs by improving processes.”

How did it start?

So why did we all start writing like this? My theory is that it starts in school. If I handed this article into an English teacher I’d be lucky to get a C for it. Why? Because (apart from all the typos) I’m trying to write simple sentences and I’m not using big words unnecessarily. This is because I want you to understand what I write. I’m not trying to pass an exam or impress you with my use of structure. But this is not the way we’re taught to write.

Then there are word limits. If you’re anything like I was at school, word limits on essays did not mean cutting text out. No, they meant adding words in and using 4 words when 1 would do.

These habits are hard to break.

So what harm’s it doing?

Waste of the author’s time. In business, time means money (I can’t believe I just wrote that.). If you waste time then you’re wasting money. So spending hours writing things that could be written in a few minutes is helping nobody.

Waste of the reader’s time. Verbose documents are difficult to read. If the document you just spent hours writing is difficult to read then you’re wasting everyone’s time. And the organisation is picking up the bill.

Loss of sales. Customers will quickly stop reading text that is onerous to read. If this text is on printed sales materials then you can say goodbye to that sale. If it is on your website, the customer is likely to have a bad experience. This is worse than just losing that one sale. Bad experiences effect the way customers feel about the organisation. So they may leave and never come back.

A risk to the company. Bad writing also represents a business risk. Documents that tell your employees how to perform their role need to be very clear. If not, employees can end up doing things that cause financial loss. One example of this I witnessed led to a company’s employees unwittingly breaking the law.

Lessons from web writing

Some of the principles of web writing are specific to websites. But many are just principles of good writing in general. These include:

• Get straight to the point and follow up with exceptions.
• Use short and simple words and sentences.
• Use headers and sub-headers to allow the reader to read the bits they are interested in.
• Keep paragraphs short.
• Use bold text to emphasise your key points.
• Use mostly active sentences.

There are probably a good few more but I can’t think of them just now.

Recommended reading

The most comprehensive book I have read on the subject of web writing is Letting Go of the Words by Janice Reddish. If you write anything that goes onto websites, I recommend you read it. It also has good advice for clear writing in general.

If you don’t write for websites, but want to know more about writing clearly then the Campaign for Plain English is a good place to start.