Screen vs. print document design

From the point of view of Jakob Nielsen (1997), really good writing- you don’t see much of that on the web. Meaning to say that people usually do not read on the web, they just simply scan through the information in the web. This might due to a lot of reasons such as the improper way of the designation of the web. In terms of scanning document, it involves elements like headings, fonts, bold, italic, colours, font size, bulleted list, table of contents and etc. It is good to include hyperlink as this provide an easy way for readers to get information.

However, too much hyperlinks would also brought negative outcome because it might distract people concentration in focusing in one part. Additionally, text should be scannable and concise so that it wouldn’t take too much of the readers time to scan through the text. When talk about graphics, it must have complement with the content.

Screen Document

Print Document

References:

John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen(1997), Conciese, scannable, and objectives: how to write for the web, useit.com, Viewed 26 August 2011, <http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html>

Reep, Diana C 2006, Technical Writing: Document Design, CH.6, pp133-172