It opens simply enough:

How Users Read on the Web
They don’t.

Instead of just tweeting the article (which is ironically so long that people don’t read it) I’d like to instead study some examples from our site and show how it could improve our own site content.

Often, I find that some of our site content is:

• Difficult to scan
• Verbose
• Passive
• Unclear
• Likely to be ignored — users won’t read it

So what should we do about it? Well, we should tackle it from different directions:

• We should educate ourselves and become familiar with best practices
• Those who do understand the basics should do their best to teach others
• We could also conduct user research, eye tracking studies or run a/b tests to verify theories

Either way, I’ll save you some time: simple is better.

So let’s go to some examples. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Bulleted lists
• Highlight key points
• Reduce unnecessary or redundant words (of, the, a, at, to, that, with the, and)
• Remove passive speech and replace it with active speech

Bulleted lists

Your goal should be to identify common threads or trains of thought. Tie them together with a lead-in. Augment the leading thought with key phrases. Our example has a common entity: Mozilla. So how can we apply a list to this paragraph?

Before

Mozilla is a non-profit. We don’t have shareholders. We’re not trying to get acquired. Our bottom line is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

After

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

Highlight Key Points

Highlighting helps users quickly scan key points. They don’t have to read word-for-word but can pick up the general concept of a block of text without reading the whole thing. This is typically how users read on the web, and studies show how important writing scannable text is.

In our case, let’s take the first sentence and see what we end up with.

Before:

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

After:

Mozilla is:

• a non-profit company
• loyal to you, not shareholders
• promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web

The addition of bulleted lists gets us farther, but highlighting keywords dramatically improves the visibility and likelihood that those concepts will be communicated to a web reader.

Reduce Words

The single most common problem is that people write too much. In technical writing and web writing, the goal should be content over style. Simple, clear, concise text wins; then users can focus on the content, not on deciphering what you’re actually trying to say.

Words that don’t add anything to the message are a huge problem. We can break up or eliminate some sentences in our example:

• Mozilla is an extensive open-source software development project powered by a small (but growing) staff and a worldwide community of dedicated volunteers. (before: 23 words after: 10 words)
• Because our products are used for many of the web’s most innovative projects., a job at Mozilla allows you towill develop cool, useful technology that impacts millions of lives. (before: 29 words after: 20 words)

You can say the same things using less effort while benefiting users. All kinds of win.

Fix Passive Speech

Speaking passively increases the length of your sentences while reducing clarity. Here are two examples:

Before:

Because our products are used for many of the web’s most innovative projects, a job at Mozilla allows you to develop cool, useful technology that impacts millions of lives.

After:

You could impact millions of lives developing innovative products at Mozilla.

Here by focusing on “you”, you eliminate a ton of words but deliver essentially the same message.

Before:

At Mozilla, we encourage creativity and ambition with the goal of revolutionizing how people access the web.

After:

Mozilla’s goal is to revolutionize how people access the web by encouraging creativity and ambition.

By changing our sentence structure to focus on Mozilla, we eliminate the need for words like “at, we, with, the”.

That’s it. Go forth and write great content. Visit the Writing for the Web main page to learn more.

He gave Mozilla a shout out and said we're an inspiration for other companies trying to do things the right way and focus heavily on what people want and need. He also mentioned he's an avid Firefox user and tries to install it on every machine he can get his hands on!

Another thing worth noting was his comments on crowdsourcing -- that's it's not at all about getting a group to do a bunch of work for you. In many ways the textbook definition of crowdsourcing betrays the real value in it.

He said it should really be called co-creation because their community as well as potential customers for this car are a huge part of what the car will actually be and how it will evolve over time. It is a good way to look at things, and not very different from what Mozilla strives to do from day to day.

Overall, it was a great experience and the car is damn cool. Thanks to Jay and his team for visiting us. See more pictures here.

Over time, if you keep up with it you can see improvements in different categories:

• Distance - you can run more as you get in better shape
• Heart rate - peaks and average should normalize
• Time - you'll improve your time (ideally!)

Since I'm not a running super-beast and I'm not very fast, I have been pretty interested in the heart rate! I'm also interested in it because the first few runs were pretty tough because I'd run for a bit (at the speed I remember running at) and my heart would go nuts and I'd have to walk for a bit. For a while I'd have to keep doing that, and my heart rate chart showed why.

On my first run in about 2 years, I was getting owned:

After waking up this morning at 430am and going for a crazy morning run (which, if you knew me, is something I never do), I was happy to see this:

I still have to walk a bit in the middle of a 3 mile jog, but while I'm running my heart rate remains constant and it never felt like it was going to explode. I'm now able to sustain for longer and I also have less movement between 180 and 200 bpm (Note that the top graph was 1.5 miles and the bottom one was 3 miles).

As I was writing a blog about browsing statistics and how they can improve how we use the web, it made me think of this little Garmin watch and how knowing more about my own body can help me improve my life.

Data is good, knowledge is good. By itself, not so much -- but if you use it right it can make all the difference.

Well, you do. And here's the thing:

• Only you have access to it
• It's under-utilized
• You probably didn't even know it existed

Browsing could be better. There's no question about that. We have set conventions and preconceived notions about how browsing should be. That is, until the next big thing comes along and rocks our world.

It feels like using data to improve browsing is a no-brainer, and data-driven browsing is already the next big thing. You see this in search suggests, amazon suggested items, the iTunes store, and other sites. And that's just all site-specific. Imagine if we used data the right way and made things just click?

On a limited scale, it's all more than possible today. You have complete control over your own browsing history:

• Sites visited
• Bookmarks
• Awesome bar history
• Media viewed
• Favorite sites
• Search keywords
• Trending of all the above

Simple fact is that you're not using as much as you could.

The Firefox awesome bar was heralded as a great step in browsing innovation. And it's true, it really was. And that's because a lot of browsing is really repeat browsing. How many times do you go back and view what you just looked at the other day?

But that's the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of things we can learn about the web and about how we use the web to make it better. And don't think about person -> corporation -> other corporations. For starters, think about what you could do with just your own browsing data, or your family's browsing data:

• Easy access to repeat searches - movies, facebook, maps, you name it
• An automated media catalog of images, videos and news articles you read over time
• A list of phone numbers you have looked up and who they belong to
• A list of all map directions you've ever done
• A list of people you read about over the last week

The awesome bar in Firefox already uses this, and it's great to see some Firefox extensions are already tapping into the possibilities:

• about:me lets you read about your own browsing statistics
• Voyage is a very cool way to not only view the sites you've used but see how you got there over time and whether or not you Tweeted about it!

Those are just two examples of what we can do and where we can go. I'm pretty excited to see what happens next. Maybe you have the next great idea -- go forth!

So I did my first successful restore from a Time Machine backup. However, while I was waiting, I used a vanilla install of Firefox. I noticed that I couldn't tab through form elements and it would jump straight from the page to the address bar. WTF?

Here is how you enable this tab behavior that you're used to on Windows:

1. Go to System Preferences... in the apple menu
2. Open Keyboard & Mouse
3. Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab
4. Check All controls

This will let you tab through individual web elements normally. Screenshot below, in case it helps.

Update: Alex Faaborg noted that you can track Bug 437296 if you'd like to follow overriding OS keyboard settings to maintain a consistent user experience in the browser across platforms.

Update: Chris Ilias pointed out so kindly that this is already in the Mozilla Knoledge base.