Writing for the Web 1
- New York: Monday, March 22
- Chicago: Friday, April 23
- London: Thursday, May 20
Hoa Loranger
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
- Understanding people
- 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
- Rules of thumb for different types of sites
- Understanding writing
- Rules of Web writing
- Guidelines for effective communication
- Writing for fast comprehension
- Telling a story — narrative flow
- Content chunks
- Increasing your content's appeal
- Considering look, feel, and voice
- How to increase credibility on the Web
- How users learn to trust
- How to keep that trust through good content
- Writing to be found
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Keywords
- Techniques to avoid
- Understanding formatting
- Navigation
- Microcontent, Macrocontent, and other summaries
- Organizing content
- Linear and non-linear narrative
- By task
- By topic
- By audience
- Alternatives
- Optimizing every part of the page
- Headlines and titles
- Body text
- Captions and callouts
- Lists and tables
- Graphical elements
- Informative links
- Understanding organizational politics
- Style guides
- Repurposing content
- What types of content repurpose well
- How to use content across media types
- Content management strategies
- 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.
Instructor
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has
consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based
applications, investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
| 
