Loving readers with dek and lede

Photo by Monoar Rahman / CC0 License | Modified from original.

You can easily make your blog more usable with a couple of old-timer usability tricks. And doing so might give away that you care about your readers.

I just added dek and lede to my blog posts. ‘Dek’ (also spelled ‘deck’) is typically a phrase that appears close to the headline of a news story to help you decide whether this is something you should read or not. ‘Lede’ (or ‘lead’) is an introductory sentence or paragraph summarizing the story’s essential content. These are two usability tricks from the news business you might consider for your blog.

While some newspapers have brought this with them into the digital world some have not. I find that sites that use a dek in addition to their headlines - specially on their front page - better to use, as they give away more information on the story content and I can decide faster if it is worth reading.

I added both dek and lede to my front page to make my blog easier to navigate. To me this is about making my blog more usable. After all, I am not making any money from you reading stuff you don’t care about.

You will find a summary of the changes on Github.