Guide: Make text 300% easier to read by making lists scannable online
Published in
2 min readOct 22, 2020
One of the fundamental differences compared to print media, is that people spend less time reading online, and more time scanning.
I learnt a lot of great web copy techniques from this book: Web Copy That Sells by Maria Veloso.
Focus on the first word
Humans are inherently lazy, so make it easy for them to scan through large lists by making the first word in the list stand out.
In this example, the first word for most of the items is “cat” which makes it more difficult to find the topic of interest.
Typically, people focus on the first 11 characters in the sentence to find key words. If they don’t see what they’re looking for, the eyes skip to the next line.
By rewriting the entire list, we can bring keywords to the front, making it up to 300% easier to read online content, because users take up to a third of the time to find the same piece of information on the page…
