Challenge your readers

Hearing differing view points is good. I love a good counter-intuitive idea, provided it works of course, and Usability Post provides us this week with just such an idea. They argue that making your content difficult to read isn’t such a bad idea. Wait. Yep – you read that right. Here’s a direct quote:

Every article I read on writing content for the Web revolves around one key idea: make the content easy to read. It’s all about making it scannable, writing great headlines and headings, and using simple and clear language. But before you follow that advice you need to answer this: why?

Ok, questioning the accepted convention is typically a good idea, but it seems that making things difficult for your readers flies in the face of everything we’ve learned, and think we know, about site usability. Here’s how the post explains it:

writing content that’s difficult to digest slows the reader down. They can’t scan it so they have to slow down and actually read it. If they cannot understand something they may even have to stop and think about what they’ve just read — perhaps even re-read it over again.

The author goes on to say that making things really, really easy to digest and simple to understand may actually be doing yourself and your users a disservice – depending on what industry you’re in, of course! If you’re selling something you likely want to make things as easy as possible for potential customers. Same thing if you’re going for high page views or click through rates. But if you run a blog, for example, or an online magazine, you want users that will be able to identify with what you’re saying which, quite often, will probably not be incredibly simple. And in that respect, creating complicated content IS in favor of usability.

So what do you think? What type of site do you run and how do you make sure your users are able to engage at the level you desire?