UX, more commonly known as User Experience, is such an important part of the content creation process. It entails everything from the site’s overall loading time and navigation speed to the readability of your actual content.
However, while it’s easy to draw focus on page loading times and the technical side of things, the format, style and focus on your content can quickly be left by the wayside. Here to ensure you’re giving your readers and subscribers the best experience, here are the dos and don’ts of making content to ensure it’s highly scannable.
It’s important that you give the headings you use in your content a lot of focus. Not only is this important for SEO (H1 & H2 etc.) it’s also going to help your readers to scan your content to make sure that it’s readable.
If you haven’t used headings, your content will simply be one big block of content, and that’s not scannable. Using headings, the reader can quickly find what they’re looking for and read the sections they want to read.
When trying to think of catchy lines for your headings, feel free to use professional creative services, just like State of Writing and Grammarix.
When it comes to actually formatting your content, it’s so important to remember that opposites attract and can help you, in a design sense, to make things stand out and to draw your reader's attention to certain aspects of your content.
For example, you’re going to want to avoid poor colour combinations that may change things difficult to read, such as blue on red and yellow on white.
When designing your content pages, you can use online apps and tools such as Balsamiq or Go Mockingbirdthat can help you to create captivating and engaging pages for your website.
One of the most important aspects of UX that you need to remember, or both the benefit of you and your reader, is to include a related content section. This could be in the sidebar of your website or after your original piece of content has finished, but it needs to be there.
This is so your reader can continue to find information that’s related to them and can continue their experience on your website while it benefits you because you’re keeping the customer on your website as well as improving your SEO ranking.
Handwriting-styled fonts and block fonts are best avoided at all costs when it comes to your content because you’re simply making it hard to read and your readers will simply leave. When choosing the font you want to use, you’ll want to make sure that you’re picking one that works well for both desktop and mobile viewing.
Try and stick with sans-serif fonts if possible since the letters will remain clear and won’t blur together, especially with masses of content. Also, make sure you consider the size of the font, in which some people claimed 16pt is the perfect reading size.
For more information on font size, check out Icomoon and Edge Web Fonts for leading resources, testing and information.
Although mentioned above that sometimes long-form content is always avoidable, it is recommended that you keep things as short and sweet as possible. This is because your readers won’t always have time to read everything that you’ve written and the longer the amount of time that they spend reading something, the more chance they have of getting bored.
Try and cut down your word count where you can to ensure that your content is as easy to digest and consume as possible.
When it comes to longer content, although it’s important you should stick with short content where possible; it’s obviously sometimes unavoidable. In these situations, it’s important to break down your content into sections and paragraphs, hand in hand with the consideration above, but then also to add a summary to your section.
This helps your reader who may not have time to consume the entire piece of content to quickly read the summaries that will provide a brief outline to the section.
It’s easy to get carried away when you’re writing content that you forget to hit the ‘enter’ button and you’ll end up with huge blocks of text.
If uploaded in this format, this can seem extremely daunting to a potential reader who won’t want to sit and read all this information, even if they’re read the same amount when it’s broken up.
It’s so easy to get caught up on certain topics or carried away in certain frames of mind, but this needs to be avoided at all costs. Simply stick to the point and stay on track.
As you can see, there is a tonne of ways you can use UX techniques to better the engagement rates and the performance of your content. If implemented properly, you’ll be able to provide your readers with the best content experience that they’ll keep coming back for.
Gloria Kopp is a content marketer and a blog editor at Oxessays. She is a regular contributor at HuffingtonPost, Quickspot and Paper Fellowsblogs. Besides, Gloria is an author of the Studydemic educational blog where she shares her writing and career advice with students.