A text-heavy page looks daunting, since the user subconsciously assumes that reading everything is compulsory. Just like a machine has no unnecessary parts, a website or app should have no unnecessary text. A heuristic is: get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.
The following is especially prone to excess:
- Happy talk: text containing banal platitudes suggesting how great the app is. It’s just a whole lot of ‘blah blah blah…’.
- Instructions: users read these only after several failed attempts. Strive to make the page self-explanatory, so minimum instructions are needed.
Book summary 