Writing for the Web 1
- Toronto: Monday, August 9
- San Francisco: Sunday, October 3
- Edinburgh: Monday, October 25
Janelle Estes
Marieke Obdeyn
Full-Day Tutorial
What’s in a word? Users approach online information differently than information contained in print media.
Learn how to capitalize on this difference with some simple but powerful rules. Our research shows that rewriting
text according to our “Writing for the Web” guidelines often doubles the usability of a website or intranet,
and drastically increases the success rate for effectively communicating key messages.
Attend this tutorial to discover how your choice of words influences the ways users navigate to — and
around — your site. Learn to use words online to entice and educate users, and to more effectively convert
them into repeat customers.
Course Outline
- Reading and scanning behaviors
- How users read
- Reading in the real world
- Reading online
- Findings from our eyetracking studies
- Differences across user groups
- Understanding your audience’s comprehension level
- Reading levels and low-literacy users
- English as a second language
- Simplified writing
- Rules of Web writing
- Guidelines for effective communication
- Writing for fast comprehension
- Telling a story — narrative flow
- Content chunks
- Writing to be found
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Keywords
- Search landing pages
- Techniques to avoid
- Content organization
- Site organization and structure
- By task
- By topic
- By audience
- Alternatives
- Optimizing every part of the page
- Headings and titles
- Summary text
- Body text
- Callouts
- Lists
- Links and link text
- Images and captions
- Graphical elements
- Creating accessible content
- Quick accessibility fixes
- Organizational politics
- Integrating content strategy into a development process
- Where and how to start
- Creating and style guide
- Justifying the re-write
- ROI calculations
- Metrics to collect when measuring content usability
- Gathering evidence, testing your content
Format
Full-day tutorial encompassing lectures, video highlights from user testing and eyetracking,
and exercises. Real-world examples are used to highlight points throughout the day.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This session is intended for anybody who communicates online; Web designers, intranet contributors,
online and technical writers and editors, usability engineers, sales and marketing professionals, and managers of these functions.
Although there are no prerequisites, a general knowledge of Web usability issues and some general experience with writing are useful.
The course will, however, cover some basics before delving into more complex issues.
Related
This course is a companion course to Writing for the Web 2. To learn the
topic in depth, we recommend that you attend both days, but each is structured to offer a complete single-day experience.
If you need only the basics, attend the first day, or for advanced material, choose the second.
Instructors
Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Estes began her career as a
research associate on the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, where she was involved with many research
efforts related to user experience and user-centered design. Additionally, Estes has worked as a user experience consultant
with companies across many industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
Most recently, Estes worked at Chordiant Software as a Human Factors Engineer in an agile development environment. Estes
holds a B.S. in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an M.S. in Human Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley College.
Presenting in Toronto.
Marieke Obdeyn is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Before joining NN/g,
Obdeyn was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the National Football League, where she worked
on several large-scale website redesign projects. She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General
Hospital. Obdeyn holds an M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of
neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College Utrecht, in The Netherlands.
Obdeyn is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in San Francisco and Edinburgh.
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