Why is scannability important?

Text is an extremely useful communication medium. You’ll need it for your homepage, category pages, product detail pages, help page, and many more.

So it’s important to make your text scannable. If your product description is 200 words long, the average customer will not really read it in its entirety. They’ll mostly scan the description for important product attributes. It would be a disaster if they were to encounter a massive wall of text instead of easily scannable content.

 

Why are walls of text bad?

 

What to do with a wall of text

If you have a wall of text, you need to break it up.

During testing, we observed that if subjects came across product descriptions made up of large blocks of text with few or no bullets, they often felt overwhelmed and had difficulty finding relevant information. And when subjects encountered bullet lists with few or no blocks of text they were often left with unanswered questions about technical terms or features. In either case, the product description was judged by users to be insufficient and the product was often abandoned. (source)

 

Here are a few things you can do to make it visually appealing:

 

Examples