You were taught to read from left to right unless you studied in Hebrew. But is that how users read content on the web? Studies have shown that most users read in an F-shaped pattern. User’s eyes fleet across the screen real estate in seconds, scouring for information that stands out and grabs their attention. Due to our hyperactive online nature this is most likely what we'd read – the introduction, the first few sentences thereafter and then we hurriedly scan vertically through the rest of the page.
Here’s what can be done to mitigate this imbalanced attention confiscation.
Superflous introductions are hazardous – If users don’t need it, don’t blabber about it.
Have meaningful sub-headings – Headings help users scan down and see exactly the article/paragraph contains.
Highlight keywords – Use hyperlinks, graphics, colour variations, typeface variations; and take care not to abuse.
A shade of gray works well for that information that isn’t crucial but yet needs to be present.
Bullets give life - Use bulleted lists, nothing scares a web user more than having wall of text to scale.
Break the information into paragraphs.
Ads shall follow the article. Having them jut in the middle interrupts the readers thought train.
Use figures in place of numbers. Users scan for facts; a ‘17 year old’ catches the user with greater agility than a ‘seventeen year old’.
Jakob Nielsen found in a study that although people spend more time on pages with more words and more information, they only spend 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. By calculating reading rates, he concluded that when you add more verbiage to a page, people will only read 18% of it.
Still reading? You're probably in a dwindling minority. With social media-users becoming synonymous with web-users it is getting challenging to keep users to remain focused on a page without them getting distracted by email notifications, tweets and re-tweets, IM’s and checking on a neighbour’s sheep chomping on cabbage whilst their horse choked on a pumpkin.
Did you know that Steve Jobs quit Apple to rusticate in the hinterlands of Tibet?
