Feb 15, 2019
2 words.
That’s all people see when they scan links and headlines on your pages.
11 characters, on average.
That’s all you get to attract people’s attention on your SharePoint site.
That’s what a Nielsen Norman Group study found when they studied how users read online content.
Why should you care?
Let’s take the SharePoint news list for Contoso:
I’m sure you’ll agree that every news article on the list above is important. Right?
Now, if people really see the first 11 characters of a headline, let’s show what they actually see when they scan the news articles:
Hmmm, doesn’t make much sense, does it?
The average length of Fortune 1000 company names is 14 characters long. Even if you don’t work for a Fortune 1000, chances are your company name takes valuable space in headlines.
That’s attention-grabbing space you could use to get your employees to pay attention to.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to create news that will make your employees pay attention to.
My mentor at McKinsey & Co once gave me the definition of communicate:
To communicate is to convey a message that results in a change in behavior.
If you don’t get the desired change in behavior, you’re making noise. You’re not communicating.
This article assumes that you want to write news and headlines because you want a change in behavior:
If you don’t care about changing behaviors, you don’t need to read this article. You can post a comment to say how great this article was and I won’t tell anyone.
Otherwise, read on!
In another study, Neilsen Norman Group found that when people read online content, they read in a F-pattern.
That is: when reading online, people take some time to read the first few items in a list. As they continue to read through the list, they read less and less.
Eye-tracking study, source: Nielsen Norman Group
Eventually, they scan through the left side of the list.
That’s when they only see the first few words of a list item. They’ll see a little more if you use shorter words, and less if you use long words.
They don’t actually count 11 characters and stop reading.
Also, the F-shaped pattern is not the only reading pattern. There are others.
One thing is clear: people scan content when they read.
Microcontent is a type of content that consists of short text fragments. You find microcontent in page titles, headlines, email subjects, etc.
In SharePoint, the News web part is a bunch of microcontent.
Microcontent is often shown out of context. For example, the aggregated news in your SharePoint start page, or in search results.
Microcontent helps readers when they scan. It lets them decide what they should click on.
Microcontent also helps readers search and save. They may find your news through search results and open each result in a new tab. Or they may add the links to their favorites. When they come back to your links, you need to provide them with context.
Whatever they do, you need to write your content so that it makes sense for users.
Every news article in your SharePoint site should consist of two microcontent elements:
The short text that grabs the user’s attention. SharePoint uses the title of your news article as the headline.
When you write headlines, you should consider the following tips:
Consider skipping these words:
Even better, skip these words too:
The one or two paragraphs below the headline.
If the headline’s job is to attract attention, the lead’s job is to convince the user to click on the article.
They should be:
Most important: resist the temptation not to write a lead. Tell users what’s in it for them.
Remember that links are promises. Every time a user clicks on a link, they expect that whatever page they go to will match what they clicked on.
Every time you break a promise by taking a user somewhere different than what they clicked. When you do, you chip away at their trust.
If you want people to use SharePoint, it needs to become a trusted and authoritative source of information. Every time you break users’ trust, you lose credibility. People will stop going to SharePoint to find information.
You should allow your users to confidently predict what they’ll get if they click. Do not be misleading or promise too much.
Whatever you do, don’t use “Click here” in your headline or lead. That’s soooo 1995!
Other than being uncool, here are reasons why you shouldn’t use “Click here”:
Enough theory. Let’s create a news article!
Enjoy your new news article!
Sometimes you just need to link people to news that are hosted somewhere else. You don’t need an article, you just need a link.
Here’s how to do this:
SharePoint News is an awesome new feature of SharePoint modern sites.
If you want your employees to read your news, make sure your headlines attract attention.
In this article, I focused on headlines and leads. I did not discuss other aspects of the news. That’s for another article.
I hope this article will help create news that will improve your SharePoint experience!