Xooxia Development

When writing web content, use the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ technique

There is a profound difference in the way content is written for the web versus content written in papers and research. Web users have become accustomed to scanning through content and if not quickly becoming satisfied with the information, they click elsewhere. Therefore, it is extremely important to employ the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ technique when writing content for the web.

What is the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ and how is it different from the traditional style of writing you learned as a student?

In traditional writing, you start laying a foundation at the beginning of the writing. You then provide details and explanations and then eventually grow to the conclusion of the paper. The ‘inverted pyramid’ technique, as used most commonly by journalists, is simply providing the conclusion at the beginning of the writing. You then give any important relevant information and towards the end you provide specific details. This allows the reader to get the important information without committing too much time to the writing. Readers that are in a hurry (web readers), will scan the first few lines and if interest is sparked, then they’ll continue reading until they feel they’ve acquired enough of the information to satisfy them. If you want your reader to get your information, provide the most relevant information first, then allow them to continue on to more specific details.

Eye-Tracking studies

We know that web readers scan information in much the same way they scan newspapers by way of eye-tracking studies. I’m not going to go into detail about how the study is conducted, just know that we can follow where a user’s eye is focusing on a web page. By collecting this data and combining it with other users, researchers can develop what is known as an Eye-Tracking Heatmap like the one here.

This heatmap was the result of a study conducted by Jakob Nielson and Kara Pernice. You can view their explanation of the eye-tacking study at their website: http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/.

“Areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer fixations, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.”

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