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Words Aren't Cheap. They're Priceless.

By David Smith

Picture your typical multimedia development team. You have a project manager, a designer and a coder. Of course, there may be a corps of underpaid, sleep-deprived artisans working for those three, cranking out screens, graphics and code. But these three make the important decisions. Let's listen in on a design meeting: "OK, the navigation makes more sense now. Once you fix the colors behind the spot visuals, this should all be approved. Don't forget to modify the layout for the response screen, and link them back to the section main page. Oh, do you have a block of copy for here?"

Sound familiar? The last thing considered, crafted and reviewed is the text. Problem is, the text *is* the content, or at least 90% of it. Yet most Web site projects devote the vast majority of their time, talent and money on graphics and technology.

Here's another clue from User Interface Engineering, a company that performs research, training and consulting on software product usability. The company offers a two-day course called "Web Sites that Work: Designing with Your Eyes Open." Here's a description of the section on Graphic Design: "Some designers place more emphasis on graphics than they're actually worth.

You'll explore why graphics don't really help or hurt on sites where users are looking for information, but how they may play a role in branding." The key idea here is that graphics and information are two different things. Good Web design makes it easier for users to absorb the information. Great Web design also imparts a visceral feeling about a company. The information is the text within the design.

As developers of marketing CD-ROMs and presentations, as well as Web sites, we've seen writing short-changed throughout the field of multimedia. I imagine this is because, all along, it has been so simple to make text appear on a computer screen. Heck, the industry's been doing that since the late 1950s. Just send the programmer something, and she can slap it up in no time. The real challenges - and the sexy part of the job - have been adding shapes, colors, movement, sound, video and interactivity. Yet much of the industry has forgotten that all those enhancements usually serve to make it easier or more exciting to get to the meat: the words. Here are several steps for avoiding this trap:

Make sure someone on your team has experience in writing for your intended audience. Early in the development cycle, this person is responsible for making sure that the right themes and information are woven into the architecture and design guidelines. As the project reaches production, the writer manipulates the input content for the medium (see next bullet).

Don't cut and paste printed copy into Web pages. Brochure copy is written to work within an 8-1/2 by 11-inch printed page, probably with multiple columns and at high resolution. It may become hard to understand, too long, irrelevant or misleading when placed within a screen of a multimedia project. Edit, rewrite, rework or throw it out and start from scratch. Write with full awareness of the context, the purpose and the subsequent options presented to the user.

Consider both what the user wants and what you want. There are two aspects to navigation: making sure visitors can quickly and easily get to the information they are looking for, and making sure they know what you *want* them to do. We've had great results with simple, polite statements such as "Please fill out this simple form to help us improve our service" or "We have some exciting new information that we'd like you to consider." Many users will welcome gentle handholding, especially if they've never been to your site or used your CD before.

Review and approve text before final testing. While the physical act of changing HTML text is simple, approving a site's-worth of text is very complicated. You must consider version control, approvals, proofreading and in some cases, translation. We often print out screens for final proofing, editing and approval when they are first completed, well before the entire project comes together. This step prevents the team from deciding "let's just go ahead with what we got" at the final deadline. Remember, text *is* the information.

In this matter, I have an ally in Jakob Nielsen, Sun's usability guru (in his own words). In his December 1, 1997 Alertbox column, he lists some recent findings:

Users don't read on the Web: They scan the text. [they look for key words, and then read or print - das.] Some amount of personality (the "author's voice") makes sites more attractive: Users don't like bland impersonal corporate sites. Web users are impatient: They want to get their answers immediately and do not want to be slowed down by "cool" features, mission statements, or self-promoting grandstanding.

Users often print out pages: They don't trust the site to have the page for them if they need it at a later date (and they still don't trust sites to be stable, a rather sad finding).
Download times are becoming ever more critical and sites need to design for speed. Users have always requested fast pages, but in the early years, a novelty factor made users slightly more tolerant of slow downloads. This tolerance has declined markedly in recent years. A search feature has always been liked by users, and has now become mandatory for any large site as the amount of content continues to grow.

Nielsen is a little hard on the importance of visual design and identity, but there are key points about multimedia text in these recommendations. You must write to the context, making your key words or phrases prominent while adding a distinct voice. The *answers* are not found in graphics or cool features. They are realized as text retrieved through fast downloads and easy searching. You satisfy your user, and reach your business goals, through words.

Resources:
Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox
User Interface Engineering