PlusOne – Marketing Musings

I was interested to read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox about writing numbers for the web.

Normally I am one for resisting changes to convention, it takes a bit of effort to wrap my mind around some things, but along with other ‘new conventions’ when it comes to the web, such as use of bullet points, bolding text, plenty of subheadings etc, writing all numbers as numbers seems pretty logical.

Nielsen says that eyetracking studies have shown that numbers are attractants and stoppers of wandering eyes.

Among our discoveries was that numerals often stop the wandering eye and attract fixations, even when they’re embedded within a mass of words that users otherwise ignore.

* Why do users fixate on numerals? Because numbers represent facts, which is something users typically relish. Sometimes people are looking for specific facts, such as a product’s weight or size, so product pages are certainly one place where you should write numbers as numerals. But even when a number doesn’t represent a product attribute, it’s a more compact (and thus attractive) representation of hard information than flowery verbiage.
* How do users’ eyes locate numerals while skipping past words? The shape of a group of digits is sufficiently different from that of a group of letters to stand out to users’ peripheral vision before their foveal vision fixates on them. 2415 looks different than four, even though both consist of 4 characters. (As the previous sentence shows, stating the number of characters as a numeral makes it stand out, even without the bold highlighting.)

Its all about scalability. People scan pages, they don’t read them. The web is a smorgasbord of information and your page/site is just another plates to pick from. Offer easily found delacicies.

Digg this story

No comments »