The most helpful content is informative, engaging, clear, and mindful of how and why a client may search for help or information in the first place. The following lists are guidelines to ensure that your content is accessible and consumable for clients:
| 1. Make the Content Easy to Read |
- Write clearly and simply so your readers can easily understand the information. For example, ‘Instead of using ‘inadmissibility’ you can use ‘rejection’ which is easy to understand.
- Use examples to clarify ambiguity. For example, to clarify the term ‘sponsor,’ you can add an example, ‘to be eligible for a temporary residence permit in the USA, you may need a Sponsor in the USA. A sponsor can be, for example, your relatives, non-government organizations, or anyone who is willing to support you.
- Order your points logically and keep them to one point per paragraph. This helps with understanding.
- You should be consistent about the information and terms you are using. For example, you have mentioned ‘health service’, ’medical service’, and ‘health care’ to mean the same thing. You should only choose one term if those mean the same.
- Replace legal/bureaucratic/technical language with simple and clear words. This makes the content shorter and easier to scan. It improves comprehension for people with low literacy, and makes it easier for translators. Even well-educated native speakers have trouble reading text with a lot of bureaucratic jargon.
- Whenever a technical term must be used, it is important to remind the reader of the definition and not assume that they know it.
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| 2. Make the Content Easy to Skim |
- Keep articles short if possible, and divide content into sections.
- Articles should be short enough for users to quickly scan to see if the information they need is there. You don't want to overwhelm users with too much information in one article.
- And for longer articles, be sure to break content into sections with clear headings.
- Subheadings and line breaks are a shortcut to an easily scannable document
- Use headers, bullet points, spacing, and visuals to highlight important information
- Embed pictures, graphics and videos (external links)
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