The legendary author Kurt Vonnegut, once wrote, that writers should pity readers – because we often forget how difficult the skill of reading actually is[i]. A reader has to instantly make sense of thousands of tiny symbols – without being able to clarify what the writer meant in a particular sentence or see their facial expression when they wrote it. In literature departments across the world, some of humanity’s finest minds, spend entire academic careers arguing over what our most talented writers meant and come up with a plethora of different readings. Imparting meaning using the written word is incredibly difficult for even the best writers 

This problem is magnified online, where competing sources of information abound, and readers are used to being bombarded by random pieces of information. Most reading is done by choice and we buy books, newspapers and, magazines because we want to access the information that they contain. However, online this is rarely the case and there are a plethora of different reasons that could have brought an individual to a website. This means that the vast majority of successful websites are succinct and simple – providing a clear message that is easy for visitors to grasp and digest. However, unfortunately, many businesses fail to recognize this – opting for rambling paragraphs, a multitude of confusing menus and a host of other things that all fail to deliver their desired message. Indy Web Designers are passionate about what we do – always striving to help our customers create the best website possible for them – in the rest of this article we will go into more detail about why less text is almost always better.

The Nielsen Research 

The Nielsen Norman Group are one of the world’s leading research companies and specialize in how users experience things. They have concluded that most people read about 25% slower from a screen, than compared to a traditional paper source[ii]. This has a profound impact on people’s enjoyment of online reading and the way that they actually read online – with Nielson proceeding to conclude that the majority of online readers will scan web-pages and other digital sources for the information that they are looking for, ignoring large chunks of text and focusing on titles and headings[iii]. In another study of 2008 – Nielson found that users were unlikely to read more than 28% of the words on a website, with somewhere around the 20% figure being more likely[iv]. This means that any company who wants to successfully communicate their message – must keep text to a minimum, because users are unlikely to have the time to read lots of it. Really successful companies will focus on highlighting the text that they want people to read, using professional web designers to help them highlight the things that they want their users to see. 

Google and Visual Complexity 

Google, which has become one of the largest companies in the world, by being the best at judging what kind of websites appeal to people – commissioned a fascinating piece of research in 2012, which focused on the speed with which people judged a website. It concluded that users judge websites as visually beautiful or not within 1/50^th to 1/20^th of a second and also found that the more visually complex a website was, the less likely it was to be rated as beautiful than its simpler counterpart[v]. Thus, a complex website with a large body of text is far more likely to be judged as not beautiful and rejected by users. This also coheres with research into how readers react to large bodies of printed text on paper, with things like paragraphs and titles having long been used to make writing appear less intimidating. 

Harvard’s ‘Decision Simplicity Index’ 

The Harvard Business Review found that the best way to measure consumer engagement is via ‘the decision simplicity index’, which gauges – how easy it is for a consumer to collect and digest information about a brand; whether they can trust that information and how easy it is for them to evaluate that information. The easier a business makes those processes the higher the score the Harvard Business Review gave them. Businesses and brands in the top quarter were 86% more likely to be purchased than those in the bottom quarter[vi]. This makes complete sense – simple messages, almost always perform better than more complicated ones. Just think of the campaign messages espoused by America’s two most recent presidential candidates – “yes we can” and “make America great again”, don’t have much in common, but are clearly both short and succinct. 

George Orwell and simple language 

The iconic British writer, George Orwell, believed that writers had a duty to make their work as widely accessible as possible. Thus, he famously said that writers should never use a complex word, when there was a simpler one available. He believed that this was especially important for those who wanted to communicate complex ideas and felt that the more complex the idea, the simpler the language had to be. The same is true for website text – if you want to impress people with your loquaciousness, then use long text, but if you want to communicate meaning or persuade people to do something, then you must be short, sweet, succinct and simple.

How we can help 

Indy Web Designers take a holistic view of web design, seeking to help businesses to present themselves in the best way possible. We are committed to exceptional customer service and genuinely believe that we can make a difference. We believe that every business is different and strive to find a bespoke web design solution to suit your needs – contact our friendly team of experts, to see what we can do to help take your website to the next level.

[i] Kurt Vonnegut, ‘How to write with style’, 1980 https://www.bu.edu/clarion/guides/vonnegut-1980.pdf

[ii] Jakob Nielson, ‘Be Succinct Writing for the Web’, 1997, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/be-succinct-writing-for-the-web/

[iii] Jakob Nielson, ‘Be Succinct Writing for the Web’, 1997, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/be-succinct-writing-for-the-web/

[iv] Jakob Nielson ‘How little do users read?’, 2008 ‘https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/

[v] Alexandre N. Tuch, Eva E. Presslaber, Markus St¨ocklin, Klaus Opwis, Javier A. Bargas-Avila ‘The role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites: Working towards understanding aesthetic judgments’ 2012 https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/38315.pdf

[vi] https://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple