Do People Read Online?
Brought to you by our Guest Blogger, Nomi. Image courtesy of fo.ol.
In the nineties, one of the loudest voices to proclaim that people don't and won't read online was Jakob Nielsen, never one to shy away from sweeping declarations. Nielsen asserted that rather than read, people scan the page. Readers on the web, he posited, took an active rather than passive approach to reading. With so many pages competing to offer the same or similar information, people don't read just a single page, but tend to move between several pages and create a mental collage of the chunks that most interest them from each. People also take an active role in digesting what is written on the page. They were inclined to click on things that interested them rather than allow the layout of a page to dictate the order in which they were given information, or the relevance of different bits of information to that specific user. Additionally, he stated that readers would not scroll, so stories had to be kept short or risk going unread.
This was in 1997. A decade later, a lot has changed on the web, including Nielsen's position on scrolling. Improved screen readability, improved control over the design of text on the web, and mass-acclimation to a new medium by both publishers and readers are some of the factors responsible. The Poynter Institute recently published a new Eye Track study showing that people do read on the web, even more than they read in print.
To quote some points from the study:
When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.
Nearly two-thirds of online readers read an entire story, while in print, only 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, and only 59% did so when reading in broadsheet format.
The research also compared "methodical readers" to "scanners" in online and print scenarios and found that more methodical reading was happening online than in print. The study found that 75% of print readers are methodical in their reading, working their way through each story on a particular page, while 25% of print readers are scanners, scanning the entire page first, then choosing a story to read. Online about half of readers are methodical, while the other half scan, the report found. The survey also revealed that large headlines and fewer, large photos attracted more eyes than smaller images in print. Online readers were drawn more to navigation bars and teasers.
So, Nielsen's case back in 1997 for scanning instead of reading still holds true, but it does not in fact deter reading altogether, acting more as a preliminary stage to reading. Personally, I tend to scan until I find something that grabs my interest or suits what I was looking for, and then I actually settle in and read a story through. What I don't do is read text designed merely for branding purposes, littered with words that have lost their meaning, diluted by marketing-speak. I just consider it the junk mail of the web, to be visually sorted out from the information I actually want.
I also don't read strings of words to tell me how to navigate a page. Textual explanation of navigation elements just doesn't fly- that's where "scanning" comes in and design becomes extremely important. The role of design is not to make pretty things that take the place of reading, but to actually help readers scan and prioritize information to make it ultimately more readable. (I find that Nielsen's own site, for example, really falls down in this area.) The minute I have to actually read to find my way around a site, it's just not happening. When text is difficult to read, or when a lot of elements compete against fluid and realistic navigation of the site, it has sacrificed credibility, essential certainly for sites with retail or transactional goals but also for sites that disseminate information. Even the quality of information seems tainted by bad design. Sites with corporate goals that compete with how people honestly and actively seek information are going to find it harder and harder to corral readers into the desired behavior. And if you really, really think about it, why would they want to try?
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