This resource is an archived version of the Readability Guidelines.
New wiki is at: readabilityguidelines.myxwiki.org
Go to the Headings and titles page.
Recommendations
Headings need to be descriptive and specific, not generic.
People scan a page and often look at headings first. They decide if they are on the right page or not by your headings. The 'right page' is whether they are going to get their answer or not.
The H1 heading is what people will see in the search results.
It is the first interaction you will have with your audience and will determine if they are going to give you more than 3 seconds of their time. Use it wisely.
Be clear, concise and to the point. Action-orientated headings work well.
Front-loading headings
At Content Design London we advocate statements rather than questions in headings and putting the keyword first, where possible. Reason is: if people are scanning down a page it's faster if you put the word people are looking for at the front of the sentence. If you lead with a question, you can't front-load, you have to start with who, what, when, where, why. This takes time for our audience to read.
Example:
"Should you front-load your headings?"
"Front-load your headings."
You get to the essentials of the information much faster with the second heading.
Page structure
Using headings gives your page structure and hierarchy. If you take all the user needs for a journey, work out the channel, format and page, you can structure those needs into headings on the page to indicate importance or process.
Example:
Title: apply for a thing
Subheads: eligibility, application, if something goes wrong, appeal
In the example above, you can see the whole process you need to, or can, go through.
Amusing headings
Headings can reflect a tone and can be engaging.
Play-on-words, idioms and colloquialisms can all be hard to decipher for those with English as a second language or reading challenges. Understanding the value of the content, the channel it is on and the audience you are trying to reach is important when choosing what type of heading to use.
Usability evidence
Writing killer web headings and links Gerry McGovern, 2009
Headings are pick up lines: 5 tips for writing headings that convert Neilson Norman Group
F-shaped pattern for reading web content discovered First F-shaped pattern study by Jakob Neilson, Neilson Norman Group, 2006. Updated with different reading patterns, 2017.
First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye Jakob Neilson, Neilson Norman Group, 2006
According to Luke Wroblewski's twitter post, 11% of people start scrolling in 4 seconds if the page has loaded. 9 seconds if it hasn't. Luke writes more about scrolling, and concludes with a quote from Josh Porter: "Scrolling is a continuation; clicking is a decision."
'Scrolling and attention' Neilson Norman Group
How to use headings on your site, Yoast
Create good titles and snippets in Search Results, Google Webmasters
This is from the NNG report, How people read on the web - the eye tracking evidence.
Relevant recommendations:
This is the standout quote: "But by far, the single most important thing you can do to help users consume content is to use meaningful headings, and make these headings visually pop as compared to body text. Headings, when styled appropriately, make it vastly easier for users to read and understand web pages. As content designers, if you are not calling out sections of your web pages or prose on those pages with headings, you are making a big mistake! If you take nothing else from this report, please take this: use headings and subheadings."
But also these two key points summarised:
"If there are only a few headings, bolded words, or links on a page of text, it is almost guaranteed that the eye will be drawn to these elements."
and
"People scan the headings before they choose a section that they want to read further in. A gaze plot or heat map of this behavior will show horizontal lines, reminiscent of a layer cake."
This relates to the F-shaped reading pattern that is widely reported online: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
Another key point noted in the eye tracking research by NNG covers use of headings in tables
The key finding - "People are generally drawn to tables, especially those with descriptive headings and conservative amounts of text" - is unsurprising.
The recommendations are: