Lately as I work with our clients on restructuring the content and architecture for their student life and services areas, I’ve noticed a recurring quality: really dense content.
Content density is both the length and complexity of a particular piece of content. The denser the information, the more time a reader needs to understand and unpack it, and the more mental effort required to extract value from it. Conversely, the lighter the information, the less time and mental effort is needed.
Users have a finite amount of mental energy available to them whenever they explore our websites, and once that energy reserve is used up, we lose them. Would we rather they spend that energy scanning lightweight content, flagging an area that they’d like to explore in more detail, and then doing so … or burning all that energy mired in the depths of detail right from the start?
Dense content includes:
Lightweight content, on the other hand, is shorter, more easily scannable, quicker to understand, and easy to extract value from. As a medium, the web loves lightweight content — tweets, news headlines, or an infographic of a single statistic are all easily produced, consumed, and shared.
Dense content isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it is completely necessary at times. Conversely, lightweight content isn’t inherently good, and in many cases doesn’t have value outside the context of the dense content it is teasing out or summarizing.
For example, think about the complexity involved in describing an application process, financial aid requirements, or the legal requirements for filing a grievance as part of the student judiciary process. These aren’t lightweight issues, and it’s difficult to make the content less dense — it is their nature to be complex. That’s OK, but it doesn’t mean that visitors are expected to dive into their depths right away. In these cases, it’s best practice to first show a site visitor a lightweight summary.
The big problem is that many higher education websites (well, many websites, period!) lead with highly dense information right out of the gates, right there on the home page, or in the first paragraph of page text. Visitors hit that wall of text, procedure, or legalese the moment they step through the front door, and their brain shuts down right then and there. You might as well not even have these pages, as nobody is reading them. If they really need the information and are required to understand it, they may slog through 10 pages of unformatted text, but they will hate you for it. Or, more likely, they will call or email you to ask you about it, already irritated that they’ve wasted time.
The Internet, in its infinite collective wisdom, has a shorthand term to handle content like this: “TL,DR,” which is itself the lighter version of “Too Long, Didn’t Read.” It’s used by authors and readers alike to warn of a particularly dense piece of content in forums and blogs. It is typically accompanied by a short summary of the most salient points made in the content for those who don’t want to take the time to read it all.
If you’re already this far into reading this article and wondering what else you could have done with the last three minutes of your life, you clearly didn’t heed the TL,DR warning at the beginning. You’ll also note that on the mStoner blog, we include Estimated Reading Time at the beginning of our articles. That’s so you know what you’re getting into before you start, and can plan accordingly: ‘Can I read this in the next two minutes, or do I need to block off a lunch hour?’
Higher ed should take a cue from forums and blogs about the proper etiquette for dense content — if you’re going to have it, at least warn people ahead of time what they are getting into.
On a tight budget for time and resources, lightweight content is sometimes the only thing we have time to produce, but we have to include some dense content. This is why so few really complex, dense topics, processes, and explanations are made easier to consume for the web. It’s a lot of work to make the complex simple, right? Well, maybe not as much effort as you might think.
Here are a few simple steps you can take to be less dense with your content:
If you’re interested in seeing this approach in action, I encourage you to take a look at the Tufts University Student Life website. Explore how each item in the list has a modal preview window — this gives an overview of the detail that lives within the department, while providing useful shortcuts to the most commonly needed information. These modals aren’t meant to replace the dense information contained within these departments, but they are meant to lighten the initial experience for students.
Your content is why you have a website, and improving that content should be a top priority. Make this your resolution in 2016: Bite the bullet, dive in, and tackle the most complex, dense content on your institution’s website. Your visitors will thank you for it.