Communicating Science (or anything else) Online
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Advice on writing for the web, a discussion of the special considerations of the medium, and some best practices for developing and delivering online content.
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Communicating Science (or anything else) Online
- 1. Communicating Science Online @gary_schroeder (Or anything else for that matter. We could just as easily be talking about movie reviews, public health policy or blogs about cats.)
- 2. Hi. Iโm Gary Schroeder @gary_schroeder
- 3. The โDeathโ of Paper With apologies to Jacques-Louis David
- 4. The world is split into websites that work with Instapaper, and stuff that has now been rendered irrelevant to me. @killdozr
- 5. How is writing for the web different than writing for print media?
- 7. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlomo/5855888939/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/85671648@N03/15467473149/ FOCUSED READING INFO GATHERING
- 10. 25% slower Reading on desktop screens: https://www.flickr.com/photos/teosaurio/8857853963/
- 11. Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of whatโs left. -Krugโs Third Law of Usability Omit needless words
- 13. 500 โ 700 words 10 โ 15 words 50 words Sentence target: Paragraph target: Total length target: https://www.flickr.com/photos/erodzen/8083808978/
- 14. CHUNKING
- 16. โHappy talk must dieโ If youโre not sure whether something is happy talk, thereโs a sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while youโre reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice inside your head sayingโฆ -Steve Krug:
- 17. 89% 94% Combining visuals with text increases comprehension by Press releases containing photos and videos receive more views than those without by
- 18. SHARE Make it easy to
- 19. Why the brain craves infographics: http://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/
- 21. Spectrum of Sophistication Readers who are only interested in the punchline, e.g., โHiggs Boson Foundโ Reporter who wants to know everything there is to know about the topic โข Backgrounders โข Links to all previous articles about the topic โข Links to scientist bios โข Links to high-res images suitable for print โข Link to the full published paper Program Manager checking on how the work is being publicly portrayed
- 22. <H1>Stick to HTML whenever possible</H1>
- 23. PDFs(avoid them)
- 25. Make discovery easy Like pulling a thread on a sweaterโฆ
- 26. Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. Kristina Halvorson www.flickr.com/photos/45923218@N00/4835160197
- 27. The content strategist defines not only which content will be published, but why itโs being published in the first place. Without a strategy, weโre just running a production line for content that nobody needs or wants. www.shorpy.com/node/15585
- 28. Publishing Criteria Why are you publishing this? Info Architecture Is it logically arranged, findable? Content Strategy Messages What do you want them to know? ID Audiences Who are you trying to reach? (And why?) Work Flow Routine process for scheduling, producing, publishing Measure success (or lack of it) Metrics
- 29. ORG CHART Death by Your target audience doesnโt care about internal fiefdoms
- 31. Read these!
Editor's Notes
- Iโm Gary Schroeder. I manage the online communications program at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Iโve been in this business for about 14 years. Rick asked me to speak to you about writing for the web, what the special considerations are for this medium, and what some of the best practices are in developing and delivering online content.
- The internet severely disrupted the conventional methods of communication 15 years ago, but some institutions are _still_ adjusting. Commercial companies adjusted rapidly because thereโs money at stake, but others have taken a bit longer. Only the largest newspapers are surviving this shiftโฆmany big name magazines have either died or have hemorrhaged subscribers and are shadows of their former selves. For corporate communicators, this change impacts everything once distributed on wood pulp including brochures, flyers, tri-folds, newsletters, annual reportsโฆeverything. And the expectation is that youโll be able to go to the internet and find out everything you want to know about any given topic. Your job as an online writer is to fill the userโs expectation.
- This shift is real and huge. This picture shows how many people are now reading your content. Even folks in the communications industry may be blissfully unaware of it because this type of reading is foreign to their own patterns of media consumption. My advice is to not let your own personal biases influence your electronic communications strategy. Prepare and deliver content the way your audience expects it, not the way you would necessarily choose to consume it. Folks that want to stick with the safety of familiar waters in this regard are taking a real career risk. I know that youโve probably heard these sorts of frightening statements before. Iโm not saying it to be provocative, Iโm saying it because itโs true. And at times it makes me as uncomfortable as it may make you.
- Before I answer the question of how writing for online is different, letโs talk about how READING online is different than it is in print.
- One enormous difference from print: you cannot know on which platform or device your content will appear. You MUST be prepared for readers who will be staring at your content on a tiny screen while waiting in an airport or riding on the Metro. Your content might be read on a conventional desktop, OR a smart phone, OR an iPad or other tablet, OR something else that hasnโt even been invented yetโฆbut which will be two years from now. Letโs talk a bit about peopleโs reading habits when theyโre using one of these devicesโฆ
- In general, website visitors are not reading like we used to in newspapers (that is, relatively long reading times where attention is focused), Online readers are often just gathering information, moving from page-to-page or site-to-site. They click and forage in search of information that leads them towards some goal The visitor often knows broadly what they want, but not specifically. They might just be passing throughโฆoften theyโve arrived through a Google search never intending to come to your specific website at all. You donโt have a lot of time with these visitors. Your content has to deliver in that brief window.
- Online readers wonโt stick with content on screen as long as they will in print. There are just built-in expectations for print and online media. If the page doesnโt load in 2 secondsโฆgone! If the content breaks across multiple pagesโฆgone! Etc. Only the most intensely compelling content will hold an online reader for anything beyond a few paragraphs. (You might remember Snow Fall: the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, the internet sensation that everyoneโs been trying to repeat ever since it appeared back in 2012.) Few stories lend themselves to that extended format; certainly not the kind of content we prepare for the DOE.
- This is what reading online is like. Reading online has often been compared to reading billboards at 60 mph. To be read, your web content has to be more like a billboard, and less like a polished, stand-alone work of art. Which is probably the type of content youโve been trained to write. Online readers SCAN the page, PICK OUT key words and phrases and in SHORT bursts. Info gatherers are going to grab their target content and LEAVE as soon as they find it (unless youโre good enough to tease them with other goodies of related information that cause them to want to hang around).
- Another reason to be brief and come to the point quickly: screen reading is up to 25% slower than reading paper. (Sun Microsystems study) (Not sure that this applies to devices other than desktop screens. This study predates iPads, Kindles, smart phones, etc.)
- SO if youโre dealing with short attention spans coupled with reduced on-screen reading speeds, itโs time to look at reducing word counts. Omitting needless words has several benefits, including: Reducing โnoiseโ level on a page Makes useful content more prominent Makes pages shorter, allows the reader to see more w/o scrolling, which increases the chance theyโll scan the whole piece.
- The more words you cut out, the shorter the piece will be, and the more likely it is to be read at all. Some websites like The Daily Beast have added progress meters to let the reader gauge their time investment. Sites like medium.com actually provide an estimated reading time for each article their users post. (Presumably based on word count only.) I donโt know if this sort of length indicator is really going to catch on but that fact that they exist at all tells you that certain content providers are very aware of the readerโs short attention span (and you might even say that theyโre being respectful of their time).
- Here are some good rules of thumb for length: [ sentence / paragraph, / whole piece ] I realize that getting science stories down to this short of a length is really tough. Often, the science taking place within the Department is very esoteric and requires a lot of words to set the stage to even explain WHY the scientific result is noteworthy. And scientists resist short summaries that leave out detailโฆbecause to them, thatโs like lying. Their colleagues would burn them for taking such short-cuts. But itโs the science communicatorโs challenge to strike that balance.
- Because weโre dealing with a speed/scan medium, you can help your reader out by breaking up the wall of text into small units with plenty of subheads. This is called โchunkingโ. Chunking can include lists, bullets, small factoid call-outs or anything else that breaks up text into scannable, navigable sections. Donโt force your reader to stuff a giant brownie in their mouths, be a good host and give them smaller bites.
- Chunked vs. non-chunked. Without chunking, youโre really forcing the reader to finish the whole thing to know if theyโve found everything thatโs important to them. If theyโre really impatient, they may just bail. If you chunk it, they can quickly scan to determine which parts are what they want and which ones arenโt. They may only need to read one-third of this text to get the information theyโre looking for. I could have gone further with this example by adding bullet points, pull quotes, or little factoidsโthree other good ways to break up the wall of text.
- Hereโs something else to get rid ofโฆHappy Talk. We all know happy talk when we see it. Itโs the introductory text thatโs supposed to welcome us to a web site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what weโre about to see in the section we just entered. Online, this is completely unnecessaryโฆif it was ever necessary at all in print. If youโre not sure whether something is happy talk, thereโs a sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while youโre reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice inside your head saying โblah, blah, blahโฆโ โWelcome to our site! We hope youโll find the content here useful and interestingโฆโ Blah, blah, blahโฆ
- The web is highly visual. Images and videos affect how likely your content is read and understood. Combining visuals with text in communications increases comprehension by 89% Press releases with photos and videos receive 48 to 94% more views than those without (depending on which source you cite). Of course, videos canโt be replicated in print. Take advantage of this by including short videos featuring interviews with researchers or demonstrations of how something works. Itโs likely that if a video is present, and the visitor feels they got the gist, the text will never be read. When including photos, use pictures of the actual people, data and hardware associated with the story. Readers can spot stock photography a mile a while. It actually has an odor that people can detect; it says โfake.โ
- Make it easily shareable. Sharing spreads your content to parts of the internet that may surprise you. When content resonates, it spreads without any effort on your part. It means more than just carrying social icons on your site. It also means things like embedding videos that can be shared directly simply by using the โshareโ feature attached to the player. Public platforms like YouTube and Vimeo make this easy and itโs functionality that users routinely expect. In fact, if you donโt offer easy sharing, it may frustrate the user and you lose an opportunity to spread good content.
- โฆthen produce content that people will want to share, like infographics. The brain craves infographics because: The brain is wired to be visually stimulated Itโs a way to deal with information overload Audiences have been shown to be more convinced by an argument with a presentation that had visuals vs. verbal alone Easy to digest and generally have a sense of โfunโ, not as tedious or off-putting as plain text See http://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/
- Be aware that THIS is how people are finding your content. The days of going to an organizationโs home page and starting a content search there ended years agoโฆwhich is why most web strategists know that the home page is far less important than Management probably thinks it is. For this reason, your content should be as self-contained as possible. When the reader finds your content, they may know nothing about you or even what website theyโre on; it was just the first search hit that looked like it was related to what they wanted.
- Offer layers of information all the way from โPunch Lineโ-only to in-depth background and biographical sketches.
- Always stick to showing your content as HTML when you can. It renders downloads and renders almost instantly and will work in every device, from desktop to smart phone.
- Avoid using PDFs as your main source of content. Use it as background only or if itโs important that the source be seen in its original, unexpurgated version. It used to be that you sometimes had to provide a PDF to offer a print-friendly version. If your web team is building websites according to best practices, thatโs no longer true. Your site should be inherently print-friendly. (And how often do you print web pages out anyway?) Throwing a PDF at your visitor is like saying โhere, go read the book, I donโt have time to summarize it for you.โ Guess what, they donโt have the time to read itโฆoff to the next website! Other reasons to avoid: it might spawn a new app and itโs just slow to open. Even 2 seconds is long enough to cause someone to bail out. If itโs an image-based PDF, it canโt be indexed by search engines and it wonโt be easily readable on a smart phone. Itโs going to be a devil to deal with if the reader is on a mobile device If you do link to a PDF, always warn the user thatโs what theyโre getting so they can decide whether or not they want to deal with it.
- Have a well thought out taxonomy. For those who arenโt familiar with taxonomies, itโs a pre-set dictionary of words that allows you to fully describe and consistently classify all content. They are information that describes information, or so-called โmeta dataโ.
- Taxonomies makes the discovery of related content easy for your reader. Depending on where they fall on the Spectrum of Sophistication, they may want to follow that thread a lot farther than a single page. If youโre lucky, theyโll want to research the entire topic that your original piece is categorized in Of course, this requires a content management system. Hopefully, you have one. Now letโs just briefly touch on the topic of content strategy.
- Because the heart of all websites is CONTENT, doesnโt it make sense to start with a strategy for creating that content? How many times have we been asked to โbuild a websiteโ and when we ask โwhereโs your content?โ weโre told that, oh thatโs simple, weโll get that to you after you start building the website. Iโll bet your old website grew organically, with no master controller at the top, no Big Plan as to what the big areas of the site were going to be or how they would relate to each other. Well, NO MORE. This time weโre going to have an actual plan BEFORE we build. Content Strategy started to become a buzzword around 2007 (Rachel Lovinger) or 2008 (Kristina Halvorson). Web professionals everywhere started to say hey, our website stinks because itโs just a giant lump of junk that nobody reads. Itโs not serving itโs intended purpose. Too many people are subscribing to the Cult of Volume in which leaders feel the more crap we stuff into the website, the better it is!
- content strategy is largely about disciplineโฆthe discipline to not publish content just because you have it, but to only publish whatโs needed to make your website useful to the people youโre trying to reach or serve. CS makes you ask โWHY have this on our websiteโ at every turn. It seems obvious now, but we never used to do that. It used to be all about VOLUME! Get more stuff posted!! No one asked why. Everyone treated the web like a race to see who could post more stuff.
- The elements of content strategy
- Thereโs a big temptation to arrange and structure your content according to the org chart. Donโt do it; no one outside of your organization cares about it. Not at all. Itโs just a killer for a website. It makes your audience feel like an outsider at worst and confused at best. Organize by logical topics. Try to imagine what would appear logical to your target audience. How well you serve your target audience determines how effective your online communications programโฆor isnโt. Arranging by org chart usually just soothes the ego of someone whoโs not even part of your target audience. You know who that person is, donโt you? (Of course, there are political realities that canโt be so easily ignored.)
- Content strategy also defines the tone that your content should consistently have. Content must work for members of the science-interested public as well as other audiences. In Brookhavenโs case, we want titles, navigation labels, and content that uses terminology that is intelligible to non-scientists. Plain-language, no-nonsense labels are the goal. Examples: Big Bang Physics instead of QCD Physics and Light as a Discovery Tool instead of Photon Sciences. We won on some of these, but lost on others because out of fear that scientists would reject this and that getting approval would take too long.
- Know these books! โDonโt Make Me Thinkโ by Steve Krug โContent Criticalโ by Gerry McGovern (or just follow his blog, which is pretty good) โContent Strategy for the Webโ by Kristina Halvorson