Covid Message Rewrites
Adding brevity
CONTENT DESIGN / UX WRITING
The chaos caused by Coronavirus has resulted in millions of people hanging on the every word of Governments, stores, and services. The need for better communication has never been stronger. UX writing techniques can help add the required brevity and empathy. So after seeing some Covid-19 messages I felt were lacking in these, I rewrote them to add these vital touches.
UK Government COVID-19 advice booklet
In May 2020 the Government released a booklet on their Covid strategy for the public to download.
As it’s a matter of life and death, this should be as short, simple, and easy to read as possible. But it wasn’t. It was needlessly complex with phrases like ‘require reactive measures to be implemented reactively’. Since ordinary people don't talk this way, why explain vital information to them like this?
So I took a random page and rewrote it using UX writing principles and data proven to increase readability:
Before
After
Things I changed
- Used more simple words containing no more than 3 syllables. A long way from differentiated (6)
- Redesigned the cumbersome blocks of text into defined sections
- Added meaningful sub-headings containing the gist. Sub-heads should guide you through and tell a story even if you skim, and 79% of people scan pages, rather than reading them, as Nielsen research discovered.
- Created a layout with scannable bullet points This has been proven to increase readability by 47%
- Reduced the average sentence length from 27 to 16 words
- Reduced the longest sentence here from 49 to 25 words,
- Reduced from 535 words to 383. A reduction of 152 words or 28%.
- Nielson found that web copy scores 58% higher in usability when rewritten concisely with half the words. That suggests a 28% reduction would increase readability by 34%
- The booklet would therefore reduce from 60 pages to 42
- Reduced the number of characters per line. Before it was averaging 79 and readability has been shown to decrease with greater than 60 characters
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