Making your online text work harder

We've known for a decade now that your website visitors don't read your pages ... they scan the text for relevant and interesting information. This is why crafting flag-words into headlines, highlighting key text, creating bulleted lists and links are so important to communicating in an online world.

Now, findings from respected usability researcher Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group , suggest a new way of treating numbers online.

In short, "It's better to use "23" than "twenty-three" to catch users' eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eye-tracking data," he says.

  • Among the group's discoveries was that numerals often act as an anchor, momentarily stopping wandering eyes even when they are embedded within a mass of words that users otherwise ignore.
  • It seems users fixate on numerals because numbers represent facts - something users are searching for. Even when a number doesn't represent specific product data, it's more compact and attractive than words.
  • The shape of digits is sufficiently different from that of letters to attract attention even before the eyes fixate on them, so when scanning a page, they are selected by the readers (really they are viewers at this point) as points of interest.

"Digits enhance the scannability of Web content. It's that simple," says Nielsen.

"Even when users aren't scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful."

What does this mean for you? Many traditional style guidelines lock writers into modes very appropriate for print, but are not ideal for online communications.

  • Write "23" - not "twenty-three".
  • Use numerals even when the number is the first word in a sentence or bullet point.
  • Writing "2,000,000" is better than "two million".
  • But "two trillion" is better than 2,000,000,000,000 because readers can't interpret that many zeros.
  • It's even better to use numerals for the significant digits and write out the magnitude as a word. So, write "24 billion" not "twenty-four billion" or "24,000,000,000".
  • If you don't want to use a number as a specific fact, then spell it out. E.g. "XYZ have hundreds of happy customers." Conversely, if you want to increase attention to the fact, use the exact number. E.g. "XYZ have 356 happy customers." The old copywriters' adage still holds true ... "Specificity sells".