This is part 1 of my quick guide to readability. Personally, i’m an Evangelist for semantics and usability, and the man you should all pay attention to is Jakob Nielson. He invented usuability (well almost) on the internet, and defined a lot of standards that ideally should be followed. He backs up all his “suggestions” with practical measured studies and you can find his website at useit.
How the numbers add up:
Nielson did a detailed study of the readability of web content, and he identified several key points, one of which is the topic of discussion; Numbers! He clearly states that:
numerals often stop the wandering eye and attract fixation
and goes on to back it up with further ideas from his study:
Because numbers represent facts.
and
The shape of a group of digits is sufficiently different from that of a group of letters to stand out to users’ peripheral vision…
So what does this mean?
It means you need to write content that is departed from traditional writing style and convert your numbers to numerals. The only exception to this rule is exceptionally large numbers. Use numerals for big numbers up to one billon. Why? Because Neilson showed that:
Most people don’t understand numbers above a billion, and many people don’t even know what a billion represents.
In summary:
It’s simple, so just do it! Plus, for those SEO mathematicians, google will probably love you that little bit more for giving it some factual figures to use.
Tags: Readability, SEO, Usability