Considering people’s ever-shortening attention spans and given the shocking lack of grammar taught in public schools, it’s important to keep your writing straightforward to keep your readers on track. I didn’t do such a great job in that first sentence. We’ll have to see if I can rein in my verbose tendencies. This blog post is really to provide some top tips for writing for the Web. There are a few quirks when writing for the Web that are important to keep in mind.

• Consider your audience. You have people of all backgrounds and experiences surfing as equals. To accommodate this wide-spread audience, you’re going to want to write at about a ninth grade reading level or less. Newspapers generally follow this principle. They want their work to be as accessible as possible and so should you.
• Think about attention span. (again) As we continue on in our sound-byte driven, media overload world, people’s attention spans seem to shrink at a rate equivalent to the speed with which new toys for them to play with are developed. Not to be cynical or anything. What I’m trying to say is that you need to get to your point quickly. If you don’t capture attention quickly, your reader might surf on.
• Think about the mechanics of reading on screen. Depending on the machine a person is using, the screen size and thus the amount of text seen can vary widely. This is one of the reasons that long Faulkner-esque paragraphs don’t work well. Also, it’s really hard to follow visually as you scroll. Keep paragraphs shorter with a decent amount of space in between them.

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One of our usability engineers recently received some negative feedback around constituent records in Infinity. Unlike previous Blackbaud applications where records open in a new window, constituent records in Infinity open in the main window. So to leave the record, you don’t “close” anything, you just navigate away, like you would from a Web page. A couple of users had some trouble adjusting to this new approach.

These were existing RE users, so our hope is that they were just reacting to a change in the pattern they’ve grown accustomed to. But “they’ll get used to it” always makes designers really uneasy. Will they? How can we be sure this was an issue of familiarity and not a fundamental design flaw?

We’ll continue to test this issue with both RE and non-RE users, but I think this highlights the reality of user feedback and decision making in the design process. User input is one of several tools designers have at their disposal to help make the tough decisions, including design patterns, design principles, usability heuristics and personal experience. All of these are invaluable resources for informing the design process, but rarely do they make design decisions crystal clear. They are all very open to interpretation. In the end, it is still up to individual decision makers to make the “right” call based on the information they have.

For this reason, the real power in user-centered design comes not from a few usability tests and design heuristics, but from the development of a culture that puts a priority on user experience and encourages an ongoing, iterative process of feedback and refinement. This process doesn’t end when a product is released - existing features should be constantly re-evaluated and every new customer treated as another opportunity to evaluate your design decisions. Through these ‘layers,’ the experience becomes more and more refined:

When your decision makers are making user-informed, skillful design decisions, the difference between these levels are minimized. The process is then allowed to focus primarily on adding efficiency and smoothing out rough edges while functionality is gradually expanded. And when changes are required, this isn’t seen as a failure, but as a natural part of the design process.

I feel like we don’t talk anymore, you and me. I mean really talk. The kind of talk where I get you and you get me and there’s an understanding there. The kind that gets your blood pumping and your feet dancing and helps me design user experiences that rock your world and feel as though they took every ounce of your non-profit know-how and laid it out there in one elegant, easy to use tapestry. You know, that kind.

I see the conversations you have with other customers on the discussion boards and I get jealous. There’s passion and connection there – an energetic give-and-take that builds relationships and opens new doors to success. Why don’t we talk like that?

Sure, we do the usability testing thing. We get an hour of quality time together, you get to tell me about what you like and don’t like, and I nod understandingly while throwing in a few “hmmmms” and “interestings” here and there to try and look smart, but it’s not really a conversation, per se. Yes, we get some great, useful feedback and at least it’s a start, but it’s just not enough, is it? It’s like speed dating. Just when things are starting to click, the bell rings and we’re off to our separate worlds and it’s a heck of a time getting back together because we’re both so busy and I’m left feeling empty and alone and you’re left to wonder whatever happened to those suggestions you made and the magic of the moment slowly fades away like some distant memory.

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