Educated Readers
Posted by goodmind on September 2nd, 2008
Website usability isn’t all about having tabbed navigation and an intuitive layout. The language used within a webpage is of course quite central to user experience. Interestingly, language can also undermine user expectations. Take for example a recent post by Alain Thys on the Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog.
Using SMOG (a formula used to translate the readability of a text into a score), it’s possible to estimate the level of education needed to read and understand the content of your website. Thys ran a little experiment with several well known brands, using random paragraphs from the “About Us” pages. The results from this informal study are included below;
| Brand |
Score | Education Level |
| Nintendo | 10.49 | Some High School |
| General Electric | 12.49 | High School Graduate |
| Goodmind | 13.06 | Some College |
| McDonalds | 13.25 | Some College |
| IKEA | 13.35 | Some College |
| Honda | 13.49 | Some College |
| Nike | 14.40 | Some College |
| Citi | 15.00 | Some College |
| HP | 15.76 | Some College |
| Porsche | 15.85 | Some College |
| Samsung | 16.69 | University Degree |
| SAP | 16.69 | University Degree |
| Disney | 17.66 | Post-Graduate Studies |
| Microsoft | 17.75 | Post-Graduate Studies |
| Starbucks | 18.49 | Post-Graduate Studies |
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