The fact that people scan when on the Web has little to do with length of text. The act of scanning, or glancing through and quickly examining headlines, subheadlines and other emphasized text, is not a substitute for reading: it’s merely the first step of reading.

“I think that ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is the most brilliant thing to ever appear on a package,” I wrote on the application-site that was mentioned in yesterday’s post on sites that landed jobs at 37signals. SvN reader Michael P. Mills asked:

But what exactly does it mean to write great copy? How do we know when we achieved it? Is this something that we can learn as part of the design process, or should we have a dedicated copywriter (if we don’t already)?

When we saw the results Soocial had got from their latest A/B test, we were astonished! They added just two words next to the Sign up button and the conversions shot up by 28%. If we say the phrase was one of these: “Sign up for Free”, “It’s Free” or “Free Signup”, can you guess which one did the trick?

One rough spot had to do with sign-ups. When you sign up for our products, you can either create a new account from scratch or you can identify yourself as an existing customer. Existing customers can use the same username, see their 37signals apps in one place (Launchpad), re-use their avatar and so on. Basically it’s a big time saver and a big convenience. The problem was very few customers took advantage of the feature. Our support staff often heard from customers with multiple accounts who had no idea that they could link their accounts into a single 37signals ID. So we had a design problem on our hands. Why weren’t people logging in on the sign up screen?

To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon. It shouldn't change anything much for us or you after the deal closes, we just figured you’d like to know a few details. You see, when two companies meet over drinks and some light jazz and decide they'd like to get to know each other better… You know what? Our CEO said it best in his letter to us employees...

When I think about great, response-focused copywriting, I think about a writer reaching out, grabbing her audience by the collar, and snarling, “Buy my stuff or leave, but make a decision.”

Copywriting is interface design. Great interfaces are written. If you think every pixel, every icon, every typeface matters, then you also need to believe every letter matters.

Yawn.

It’s a good example of the way big companies wind up talking. Bloated language is what happens when copy gets filtered through a committee.

Compare that to The Saddleback Story, the tale behind bagmaker Saddleback Leather.