Too much content, too hard to digest!

I worked in a government UX/Digital Production job for over ten years and can tell you a pretty matter of fact, the analytics and user metrics say to me nobody is coming to our website for the babble.

Yes, I know we employed some brilliant subject matter experts whose sole purpose was to churn out content, at a rate of two pieces per month, times ten experts over many years, at 1000 words a pop. That’s a lot of reading material for a guy trying to produce meaningful content to have to push back on.

Most people do not come to your website to stay and read complex articles in long winded text blocks, nor do they want unnecessary instructions or pages full of quick links to meaningless FAQs containing stuff, just more useless stuff. Users want YOU to simply satisfy their goals, to answer their question, or to allow them to complete a task or to solve a problem, so they can get the “H” out of there pronto; yes, your customers have lives, so don’t bog them down with useless drivel.

Users usually skim pages looking for highlighted keywords, meaningful headings, short paragraphs and scannable lists, and they’ll skip the content that’s irrelevant to them, which is probably most of it.

Google Analytics tells me bullshit is bad for business, what do other people say:

• 55% of all page views get less than 15 seconds of attention (Chartbeat). What’s more, it seems to be no correlation between sharing and scrolling: people readily share your articles even without reading them – You Won’t Finish This Article.
• Jakob Nielsen’s 2008 study concluded that less than 20% of the text content is actually read on an average web page.
• In another usability test, Nielsen tested different wording styles for a website. Concise, scannable and objective copywriting resulted in 124% better usability.
• The pattern in which people consume online content isn’t your typical left-to-right reading that you learned in school — rather, it’s an “F” shape that indicates users aren’t reading your content thoroughly (Jakob Nielsen).
• In a usability study, Gerry McGovern discovered that only 1 out of 15 users could locate a specific piece of information that was not scannable placed on the page.
• Steve Krug claims in Don’t Make Me Think that one of the most important facts about web users is that they don’t read, they scan.