Formatting Text and Medical Web Usability

Posted: Mar 25 in Usability tagged Usability best practices by Ines

When writing content for your medical website, there are times when you need to emphasize some of your text. The website design language, HTML, provides you with quite a few ways to do this. You can italicize text, make the font boldface, change colors, or even change the format of the text to make it a heading or subheading.

However, website usability best practices state that there are certain things that should be considered when formatting text. By following these guidelines, you’re setting your medical website up to provide the best user experience possible for your visitors.

Overdoing It

When designing your medical website, it’s often tempting to use quite a bit of boldface or italics to show how important the information is. After all, it’s a website for medical information, so quite a bit of it is important!

The problem is, when your visitors read the content on your website, they’re often not reading word for word. Instead, people scan web pages for the important information and read the text surrounding it. If the page is littered with too many “important” words, then your visitors may start ignoring some of the text because they’ve become accustomed to the format changes.

Another example of overdoing it when it comes to emphasizing content on your medical website is using many different formats. Italics, bold, and “quotes” are used to show important words. So what makes one more important than the other? If you use all three on the same page, you begin to confuse your visitor. Choose one and try to stay with that throughout your site.

The use of colors to emphasize text can fall into the same trap. Changing the color of the text is a great way to differentiate between elements, but when too many colors are used or too many words are formatted, the visitor can get distracted or confused. Visitors who have this reaction are likely to lose trust in you as a professional.