Readers have the attention spans of a gnat these days, and don’t spend more than a few seconds lingering on any post or article title found in search, deciding whether they want to read the following content. It gets worse on Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to entice someone to click through.
Follow these quick and easy tips to make your post titles descriptive and memorable.
One makeover technique to improve usability is grouping like items. Sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how often like items are scattered around a site page. I found this happening on the Zappos item detail page.
I thought the page could be made friendlier with some item grouping, and a little relabeling.
An artist friend of mine said she liked to be in a room that had interesting objects in it because there were “places for my eyes to rest.” It’s the same thing with a page of copy. Your eyes need places to rest on the page as they skim it. You can accomplish this by making the page more visually pleasing with white space and other page elements.
The “Zoom Test” is what I call it when you zoom out a page far enough so you can’t really read it – so your eye doesn’t get distracted by what’s being said. You just look at it visually as shapes.
Let’s look at an example (after the jump)…
Read moreWonder if your copy is intimidating? Try the ZOOM test