Designing scannable content

Exercise 1

Select a page you published recently.

Print the page and get a highlighter pen. Highlight the most important:

• Message on the page
• Phrase in each paragraph
• Two words in each heading, list item (if you have lists), link label (if you have links).

Review the highlighted text and ask yourself:

• Is your most important information near the top of the page or paragraph?
• Are the most important words at the start of each heading, list item, link?

Exercise 2

Select a page you created recently.

Check the order of the information.

• How far down is the key message or most important piece of information? Should it be higher up?
• How could you rework the page to move the message up closer to the start?

Exercise 3

As an experiment, start drafting your next page by writing all the headings and sub-headings first.

When you’ve finished, consider whether this helped you structure your page well. If it worked well, try it again next time.

Exercise 4

Check the last 5 pages you published.

For each page, on a sheet of paper write only the headings from the page.

• Would a user get a good idea of what the page is about just by reading the headings? If not, how could you improve the headings?
• Are the most important words at or close to the start of the heading? If not, can you rewrite the headings?

Exercise 5

Select a page that is mostly text in paragraphs.

• Does each paragraph focus on a single topic? How could you rewrite any paragraphs that contain more than one topic?
• Are any paragraphs too long? How could you shorten them?
• Do you really need your first paragraph, or is it just a fluffy introduction?

Exercise 6

Select some pages that have lists (dot points or numbered lists) on them.

• Are lists used sparingly or overdone?
• Are any lists too long?
• Does each item in each list start with a unique word?
• Are the items written in parallel style?

Rewrite any lists that you should improve.

Exercise 7

Check any of your pages that have several links included in the content.

• Are there a lot of links? Are they all necessary?
• How well positioned are the links? Do they make the page look too cluttered? Could you reposition them to make the page easier to scan?