Intro Text: Cut, Keep or Kill?

Jakob Nielsen advises ruthless editing of introductory text.

Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen offers his advice on how to write effective introductory text for web pages:

The introductory paragraph(s) found at the top of many Web pages is what I call blah-blah text: a block of words that users typically skip when they arrive at a page. Instead, their eyes go directly to more actionable content, such as product features, bulleted lists, or hypertext links.

The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it's pure filler — platitudes, such as "Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful."

Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.

People read very little on Web pages. Don't waste word count on generic, feel-good material. It's not going to make customers feel good anyway. They care only about getting their problems solved as quickly as possible so they can leave your site.

Intro text serves the same purpose for an interior page as the homepage does for the entire site and the tagline does for the homepage itself. For all three scenarios, people need to know what they are getting into before they dive in.

A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page. Even if they skip it initially, they might return later if it doesn't look intimidatingly long and dense. If you keep it short, a bit of blah might actually work. So, prune your initial draft of marketese and focus on answering two questions:

• What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what's its function?)
• Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what's in it for them?)