Pattern 43: Design pages for scanning
AKA:

You know the importance of DOWNLOAD TIME (42) and appreciate that users are often busy, impatient people.

Reading web pages is an essentially non-linear activity. But texts are inherently linear. How do we resolve this conflict?

Therefore

Design pages for scanning: don’t arrange them linearly. No wasted white space. Use headlines. Include loads of hyperlinks. Make use of bulleted lists and side bars. Highlight key words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.

Include LINKS TO MANY SITES (31). Write SHORT TEXTS (44). Organize content for THE HALT AND THE LAME AND THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR (51).

Contributors and sources
Nielsen (2000)

Most people visiting sites do not read the content, they merely scan quickly: looking for relevant information or links. Headlines and subheadings help by providing CANONICAL LOCATION (21) and giving clues to maximize scanning efficiency.

Remember that newspaper-style headlines (like ‘Gotcha!’) may confuse rather than inform. Use colour and bold for highlighting important text. Don’t underline it, to avoid confusion with links.

Write the conclusion in front of the argument for it. Consider using the conclusion as the headline (as above).
Nielsen advises not starting headlines with the same word to assist scanning. He also, however, seems obsessed with a hatred of what he calls ‘cute’ – by which he presumably means witty – phraseology. We cannot concur with this unless the site must needs ignore THE HUMAN TOUCH (30).

Finally and rather obviously – though not to all web designers it would seem – use black and white text for maximum readability whenever you want visitors to be able to scan.

Browse the language	What is Wu?	Look at an example pattern sequence	Structure of the patterns
Comment on Wu	Contributors	Return to TriReme home page	Links to related sites