Scannability is a measure of how easily a piece of content can be read and understood by an organization’s target audience. It is a complete overall effect of content creation, format, and presentation. Improved scannability enhances the user experience of your organization’s content.
Measuring and improving the scannability of your content is important, as it addresses the fact that typical readers don’t read content that is presented digitally. Instead, they tend to scan it for the information most important to them. As a result, narrative writing, or chronologically-presented content is less valuable to the reader. Consistently-presented high-impact writing is easier and faster to navigate, and thus provides a better overall experience to the end user.
Scannability includes conceptual consistency, visual consistency, visually obvious navigational clues, and an aesthetically pleasing layout and presentation. Also, creating shorter and more relevant content improves the value and scannability.
Improving the scannability of your content may take longer to develop, but provides many advantages to the reader:
- Faster access to and navigation through relevant content
- Less time is required for problem-solving or answering questions
- Less confusion and increased comprehension
- Fewer errors
- More favorable user experience, improved perception of your organization
- Reduced support calls
- Improved ranking in search engines and better search engine optimization (SEO)
