I wanted to have a deeper understanding of UX writing so I had a look at an article from Nielsen Norman group which is titled UX writing: Study Guide. within this article there are links to other webpages and articles on specific topics in writing.
I decided on reading a post from Jakob Nielsen titled: First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye. The article is about how well users can understand the first eleven characters of a website’s links and headlines. Jakob describes the F pattern which is when users read the first few listed items thoroughly which is the cross bars of the F but read less and less as the list goes down, eventually passing their eyes down the text’s left side in a straight line.
Further down the article its stated that NNgroup did a study on this topic with eighty people taking part, They tested twenty different links from sites like: Amazon, Topshop, AT&T, Barclays and Intel to name a few. The users were shown links and they were asked what they’d find if they clicked the link.
The most effective links were Ann Taylor’s e-commerce site and Barclays Bank. The reason for these links winning was the fact that there’s money at stake so designers are mandated to keep the link simple, so that these sites can be profitable. Bot links also used plain language, used specific terminology and followed conventions for naming common features. The worst links from the study were Chase Bank and Directgov, as they included generic words and made up words.