Leap Walking

I’m tweaking my blog design bit by bit to improve the usability of the site. And usability is one topic I’ve been harping on about for years, but I still find myself learning it about again and again.

I’ve not done much – the paragraph lines are closer to each other to allow readers to scan through my articles faster, and the margin between the title heading and the article text have increased, so that they both stand out better and have a space of their own.

Readers don’t read everything – they scan for information. Which is why I spend time emphasizing text, adding headlines and sectioning my articles. It just helps readers get more out of that 2 minutes they spend on my site, which is an average for most websites.

So good usability is about giving the user the least amount of problems and allowing them to accomplish all of their intended goals within that 2 minute space (or less).

Good usability practitioners understand that you really need to use the site constantly to get a feel of the little things that are wrong with it, and understanding what users are looking for when they spend that small amount of time on your site.

Focus on your content

To help users get the most out, you should first focus on your content:

1. Write concisely
2. Use fewer words
3. Tell a story
4. Arrange paragraphs to compose your thoughts, priorities, and focus
5. Summarize at appropriate points (at the beginning, at the end, etc.)
6. Remove “I feel”, “I think”,… half-baked wording
7. Use captivating titles
8. Use lists

Adjust your layout

Then, focus on the layout to assist reading, scanning, and remembering:

1. Choose an appropriate font-size: 11 to 12px is OK
2. Balance this with the appropriate line-height. Mine’s set to 1.15em. It’s a bit technical, but you can read up about it.
3. Margins between title headers and content – too near means it’s hard to scan, too far means it’s breaks the flow
4. Put all the other stuff on the sides and bottoms – comments, tags, similar posts, bookmarking, etc.
5. Highlight things you want people to scan and remember – catchphrases, important terms, section titles, links
6. Use clean colors for text and backgrounds (black on white, etc.)

At the end of all this, spend hours and hours reading your own content, scanning your own articles, using your own website – to fully appreciate everything the user has to go through when they use your site.

Make small changes.

Rinse and repeat.

If you liked what you read, consider subscribing.

Resources:

• Writing for a Web Audience

I was fortunate enough that my dad took us on trips abroad and other excursions. He would always make my sister and I write our experiences down, in 1000, 2000 and 3000 words (it got bigger as we grew older).

The writing habit

We would get a F4 pad, and start doodling everything we could remember, and add sketches and stuff. At first, it was just writing down our thoughts – little details we could remember about the trip. I would remember as a kid, I would start off like how children’s stories go – a brief introduction about where we went, and the juicy details in between, ending off with a nice summary about going back again (or not).

It helped me appreciate the habit of writing, and everything on paper pretty much stays the way it is – it’s like a photograph, a snapshot of your mind at that point in time.

Conversations with myself

I kept a journal in high school, and I wrote about all kinds of stuff. At the time, I was writing out my thoughts and feelings, and that helped me to develop a conversational style. I wrote more than I read.

Conversations with others

I stopped writing when I went to college, but I did write a lot of emails to my then-girlfriend over long distances. I don’t know if that counts, but I think that helped me understand a part of writing for relationship’s sake. It was hard to manage the relationship over so many thousand miles (we were at opposite ends of the world), and emails and phone calls helped. She didn’t seem to like IMs very much.

Critical thinking

I did appreciate English 102 and Lit for the formal ways of crafting a position in an argument, rebuttals and the critical thinking behind it. But I learnt most from reading excellent journalistic material during the last 7 years of my working life – from technical tutorials, gadget reviews, news reports – especially when I was looking hard for specific answers. I even learnt from forums. I also learnt from writing technical documents like requirements specifications, how-tos, user manuals, and the like.

Blogs

I started blogging in 2004, continuing where I left off in my journals. I wrote about all sorts of things, and avoided serious stuff for the most part. I only really started writing critically when I asked my boss if it would be good to have a blog about innovation and the stuff we’re doing in the office. When he let me, I started the innovation blog.

So, that’s when I started writing commentaries and opinions based on stuff I was reading around innovation topics, Web 2.0, and career articles from Penelope Trunk. No one read the innovation blog, so I let it die a natural death, and kickstarted leapwalking.

Writing forces me to think critically. It helps put things in the right perspective, especially when I’m confused or depressed and have no one to talk to. I’m glad that I have an avenue here with the blog, and I think most blogs are a lot like that.