Medical Website Usability Best Practices: Headings

Posted: Mar 08 in Usability tagged Usability best practices by Ines

Those who work in medical copywriting are aware of the fact that most people scan web pages for information rather than read the pages word for word. Websites for medical information are no exception. When visitors come to your medical website, they first scan the pages to see if the information they’re looking for is there. Once they determine that the web page has what they’re looking for, they may proceed to read the content.

To make sure that your website design and usability techniques are providing visitors with a good user experience, you have to make sure that your website’s pages are scannable. The best way to do this is through headings.

How Headings Help Web Design Usability

Properly placed headings make a medical website easily scannable because they stand out and break up the page. Since heading formats generally call for the text to be larger and bolder than the rest of the content, the visitor can easily find them on the web page. Simple formatting using <h2> and <h3> tags for individual headings and subheadings helps to achieve this.

Using Headings Wisely

Of course, you can’t just smatter headings all over the pages of your medical website, because that won’t help your user experience improve. Make sure that you use them to break up content into sections that pertain to the headings themselves; if they’re misleading, the reader is likely to move on.