User Experience 2008
Chicago
Nov 2-7		 Amsterdam
Nov 16-21

Content Usability 1

  • Chicago: Thursday, November 6
  • Amsterdam: Thursday, November 20

John Morkes
Full-Day Tutorial

Does your site or application suffer from low user adoption, inefficiency, complexity or user dissatisfaction? Your content might be the problem.

Good Web writing enables users to accomplish their tasks and enables you to reach your business goals. Bad Web writing frustrates users, confuses them and drives them away.

Rewriting text according to this tutorial’s guidelines can more than double the usability of your site, intranet, or application—and can have a significant impact on your organization’s revenue growth and cost savings.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • Research-based guidelines for creating useful, usable and appealing Web content
  • Which writing style to use and why
  • Effective ways to organize content
  • How to enhance your credibility
  • When to incorporate graphics and other media
  • Content guidelines for providing a joyful user experience

Course Outline

  • Why content matters
  • How users read online
    • Scanning vs. reading
  • Research on content usability
    • Measuring Web reading
    • Quantitative and qualitative findings
    • Promotional writing style
    • Length of writing
    • Cognitive load
  • Rules of Web writing
    • Rules that matter
    • Style guides
    • Accessibility
  • Organizing content
    • Linear vs. non-linear
    • By task
    • By topic
    • By audience
    • Other ways
  • Titles, headings, and summaries
    • Context
    • Guidelines for usability
  • Web credibility
    • How to enhance trustworthiness and expertise
  • Integrating graphics and other media content
    • Research
    • How to do it
    • User expectations
    • User attention
    • The importance of captions and summaries
  • Help and online documentation
    • The paradox
    • How to do it
  • Press releases and writing for the media
    • One reason online press releases are bad
  • Increasing your content’s appeal
    • Make users like your site or application

Format:

The full-day tutorial includes exercises, Q&A, and discussion throughout.

Handouts:

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend:

This tutorial is intended for online writers and editors, technical writers and editors, usability specialists, marketing managers, product managers, Web and UI designers, content managers, UI developers, and anyone tasked with writing, editing or managing content for a website, intranet or Web application. Suggested prerequisites are knowledge of Web usability issues and experience writing in English.

See Also:

This course is a companion to Content Usability 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:

photo of Dr. John Morkes John Morkes is co-founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the definition, design, and usability of user experiences for complex websites and applications. Morkes’ recent clients include eBay, Fonts.com, Freescale Semiconductor, Oracle, Sprint Nextel, TiVo, and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. Previously, he was the Director of Human-Computer Interaction at Trilogy Software, where he led efforts to improve the usability of the Nissan and Ford websites, which Forrester Research rated as the two best consumer sites in the industry. Morkes has worked as a usability engineer for Sun and HP and as a journalist for Wired and R&D Magazine. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He has presented tutorials at Nielsen Norman Group conferences for the last nine years.