RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

Nanocontent: Can you judge a site in 11 characters?

Posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 6:12 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

No, this isn’t another joke about "nano-blogging," a parody of micro-blogging plaftorm Twitter. Rather, it’s a quick review of new research on nanocontent from Jakob Nielsen on the importance of the first 11 characters in your links and titles.

The term "nanocontent" refers to the snippets of information people usually scan when looking at web pages. Typically, it’s the first two words of a sentence. Or approximately (but somewhat arbitrarily) 11 characters.

In the study, Nielsen’s group showed people just the first 11 characters of links on about 20 popular websites and asked them to find specific information. The goal was to test the importance of nanocontent. For example, if Nielsen’s group asked users to locate information on retrieving voicemail on the iPhone, they’d theoretically be more likely to succeed if a link read "iPhone Voicemail Instructions" than "Instructions for iPhone Voicemail," because the latter buries what they’re actually looking for.

Three tips for better links

Nielsen’s group found that good nanocontent significantly improves usability, and bad nanocontent can be self-destructive. In fact, for 35% of links, users had absolutely no idea where they went. (Like this one for Chase Bank: "Introducing Chase Exclusives Special Benefits for Checking Customers." Of course, "Introducing Chase" is meaningless on its own.)

Take the study with a nano-grain of salt, because it reviewed just the first 11 characters of each link. But note that it reinforces that you should:

1. Put information up front
2. Eliminate jargon
3. Avoid useless words

And there’s more: bad nanocontent probably means your site’s content is generally poor, since it doesn’t meet the needs of users. So for a quick test of your site’s readability, scan the first 11 characters of a few links and see if they make sense in isolation.