How users read on the web

• 29.11.2007

When writing content for a site we generally act as though users are going to pore over every page, give full attention to our well honed text before giving consideration to the choice of links to click.

Well, guess what, they don’t!

There’s been a vast amount of research in this area, including a lot of study of eyetracking, that shows how users read on the web. To put it simply, what users generally do is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.

In this article about users and how they read on the web, Jakob Neilson has said, that as a result of how users view web pages, writers need to employ scannable text, using :

• highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
• meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
• bulleted lists
• one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
• the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

Useful Links

Why Web Users Scan Instead of Read
More research is needed to truly know why 79 percent of Web users scan rather than read, but here are four plausible reasons

First impressions count
A study shows internet users make up their minds about the quality of a web site in the blink of an eye

Writing for the web
Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages.

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