In yesterday’s eJournal installment (second item) I briefly discussed the use of bold face type in online writing, and said I planned to start using it more often. That prompted a note from Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s top experts in what works on the Web and what doesn’t. He chided me thusly:
I note in your eJournal that you are thinking of using more bold-facing to highlight keywords in your Web writing.
You may remember the study I did of this topic three years ago:
Not only did we find that users prefer scannable writing, we measured a 47% improvement in usability when using a scannable layout (even with the exact same words – only changing the typography).
Usability more than doubled when following all my guidelines for writing for the Web. The tragedy is that these findings have been available for free for three years and yet the vast majority of sites still use a hardcopy writing style.
Point taken.