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Abstract

Keywords: WWW, .

Introduction

Applying the Writing Guidelines

We took two

The original version

The rewritten version of the site

Concise: This was the most difficult guideline to follow,

Original:

Facilities management also portend high growth.

Rewritten:

Facilities management also will rely on new devices. ...

Scannable: Several changes were made to summarize

Evaluation

Next, the participant spent 8 minutes

Results

Significance levels for t tests:
* p <.05
** p < .01

Condition	Task Time	Task Errors	Memory	Subjective Satisfaction
Original (control condition)	637	0.91	0.33	4.9
	(315)	(0.70)	(0.35)	(2.5)
Rewritten	315**	0.10**	0.65**	6.7*
	(110)	(0.32)	(0.19)	(1.4)

The table shows that the rewritten version outperformed the original on all measures. The table shows mean scores for the following measures (standard deviations appear in parentheses):

Task Time

the number of seconds users took to complete the three tasks

Task Errors

a percentage score based on the number of incorrect answers given in the two search tasks

Memory

comprises recognition (score on multiple-choice questions) and recall (percentage of Java characteristics recalled) measures from the exam

Subjective Satisfaction

the mean score (on a 10-point scale) of ratings given by the users for four indices from the questionnaire: quality of the site, ease of use, likability of the site, and user affect.

To determine how much better or worse in percentage terms the rewritten site version was relative to the original, we normalized all mean scores for the major measures. For each measure, the original condition's mean score was set to equal 100, and the rewritten condition's mean score was transformed (by division) relative to the control. The data showed that the rewritten version of the site was "better" for all four measures: task time (80% better), task errors (809%), memory (100%), and subjective satisfaction (37%).

Conclusions

Of course, "How concise is too concise?" is not easy to answer. We made the rewritten version 54% the length of the original. We tried to cut carefully, but it is likely that some of the information we cut might have been useful to some users. However, users preferred the shorter version and even thought it was more complete than the original. (For the question "How complete is the site's treatment of the topic?", the rewritten version scored 7 out of 10, compared with 6 for the original.) Thus, concise writing is not inconsistent with comprehensive writing.

• Our first study increased usability of a site with tourist information by 124%
• The current case study increased usability of technical white papers by 159%

An additional anecdote to support our claim that you end up communicating more to your readers by following our writing guidelines. Mike Garrison recently sent the following email: I manage an internal web site inside of Boeing. I try to follow most of your suggestions about usability of my Web pages. I had an interesting experience a couple weeks ago. I reworked our top-level home page to make it slightly more scannable. It was actually a fairly subtle change. I was immediately complimented (from multiple users) on having included more information on the page, even though I had actually not changed anything except the layout. I believed you before, because you made sense, but this was an interesting experimental confirmation of your theories.

References

1. Morkes,Concise, .
2. Spool, J. M.,