Design for Effective Scanning and Skimming
Mojo Helpdesk is an online helpdesk service. On their homepage, they use a yellow highlight to communicate key points to visitors.
When the page loads, my eyes are immediately drawn to the text highlighted in yellow - ‘ticket tracking service’ and ‘get satisfaction ratings’. From there my eye naturally land on the ‘Try Mojo Helpdesk for FREE…’ which is the next page element in yellow and in a slightly darker tone of yellow.
In his column, conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg writes about ensuring you lay out your text based on how visitors scan your website and skim the text on it. While the scanning phase is more visually based, the skimming phase is reading-based:
This is where bold keywords, bullets, short text blocks, strong first and last sentences in each paragraph, legible fonts, and even effective hyperlink use make a difference.
I’ve seen similar highlight effects in use on the 37signals and Clearleft sites. It seems to work very effectively on the Mojo Helpdesk site.
Written by Thomas Holmes and posted on Thursday, 18th January, 2007.
Great product, easy to use and effcient.
↓ Quote | March 16, 2007