This morning, I attended a presentation by a verified expert. He’d crammed so much useful information onto each slide that I was squinting from the second row (and I know my contacts are up to date). As I struggled to make out the small words on the wall-sized screen and pay attention to the additional content coming from his mouth, I found myself missing whole sections of material.
This week, I skimmed through the usual wave of email newsletters. More than a few have the feel of a recipe blog–you know, the long blocks of text occasionally broken up by a semi-relevant picture before the good stuff, the stuff we came for, finally appears in a nice neat separate piece at the end.
This month, I was working on building my Instagram profile and scanning through some related fields for inspiration; LinkedIn is also next on my radar, and wow the length of some of those posts.
Solid, hirsute walls of text blocking our passage like armed thugs.
When we’ve got limited resources–which, these days, is always–we don’t want to engage big pages full of text. I don’t need to reiterate all that research here; just Google “reading attention span” and you’ll have more than you can handle to wade through. And that’s the point.
We’re in an attention economy. One of our scarcest resources is the attention of our potential clients. They just aren’t going to give you more of it because you asked nicely, and they’re definitely not going to give you more if they’re not able to find your ask in all that text.
Rather than big paragraphs like you might see in a book, consider how to break it up productively. How can you use white space and visual contrast to guide your readers’ eyes through the text you’ve offered to help them find what they need? Quickly. Efficiently. Asking the least energy input from them. Do the work for them, so they have the resources left to take next steps like signing up for your service.
Something Polished 