This just in: “Readers” actually don’t do much reading.

Indeed, just 19% of participants in a Harris Interactive poll read articles word-by-word. Many more skim mostly headlines (34%) or the full article (25%).

That means 67% skim, and 81% don’t read, online news.

Why?

People don’t have time to read online news thoroughly. Instead, they’re more likely to be skimming a text for specific information like a phone number or selectively reading to reduce the amount of time they spend with your information. Whichever “reading” technique or “reading” method they use, they are actually not reading much at all.

Beyond news

It’s not just news. People skim and scan text in other online channels and devices, as well:

• How people read on the web: They don’t; so make webpages scannable
• Do people skim, scan, read emails? Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
• People are skimming text on tablets: Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study
• People skim through the text of blog posts: They read 3.5% of the words on the page
• Eye tracking online shows where people look: Change how people see your page with 6 eye gaze patterns

Reel in your readers

So how do you catch these skimmers and scanners? According to the Harris poll:

• Hook them with your headline. A catchy headline (54%) tops the list of elements that convince skimmers to read.
• Wow them beyond words. Interesting pictures (44%) and compelling infographics (28%) are also strong lures.
• Draw them in with data. Interesting data or research that supports the article, which drew 43% of respondents to read, was the only content element that made the list.

Bottom line: Draw skimmers and scanners in with display copy and images. Don’t expect to reach them with paragraphs.

___

Source: “TV is America’s Preferred News Mode Overall, but Online is Matching or Outpacing it in Some Segments,” Harris Interactive

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Tick tock. Visitors spend less than four seconds on 25% of the web pages they visit, according to a study by University of Hamburg and University of Hannover researchers.

Those visits peaked at two to three seconds.

That means that within two to three seconds, web visitors decide that about a quarter of the pages they visit aren’t right for them.

But the longer web visitors stay, the longer they’ll stay.

Should I stay or should I go?

If you can get your visitors to spend 10 seconds on your web page, they’ll likely stay longer. And the longer they stay, writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen, the longer they’ll stay.

To learn that, a researcher named Chao Liu and colleagues from Microsoft Research crunched the numbers on page visit durations for more than 200,000 web pages over nearly 10,000 visits. They learned that the amount of time users spend on a web page follows a “Weibull distribution.”

Easy for them to say.

Weibull is a reliability-engineering model that analyzes the time it takes components to fail. Given that it’s worked fine until now, the model says, it will likely fail at X time.

Most web pages age “negatively.” That is, the longer visitors stay, the longer they’re likely to stay.

How do you keep them longer?

Meet the 30-3-30 test

Back in the mid-20th century, academician and communication theorist Clay Schoenfeld recommended the 30-3-30 rule. That is, you should present your message as if one-third of your audience will give you:

• 30 minutes. These folks are readers, and don’t we wish there were more of them!
• 3 minutes. They’re not reading the text. Instead, they’re flipping, skimming and scanning for key ideas. To reach them, you need to lift your ideas off the screen with display copy.
• 30 seconds. With a 30-second attention span, these folks are lookers. They don’t read words. They’ll learn whatever they can through an image and a bold headline.

That’s for print. Online, add another 3, for people who will give you:

• 3 hours. These folks are researchers. They dive deep for data. Give them bottomless wells of information — libraries and archives of white papers, detailed product specs, PowerPoint decks, full texts of speeches and presentations, and so forth.

“The Internet is for everybody,” write Daniel A. Cirucci and Mark A. Tarasiewicz of the Philadelphia Bar Association. “It’s for the 30-second reader, the three-minute reader, the 30-minute reader and even the three-hour junkie.”

So what does Schoenfeld’s rule look like today? That depends on whom you ask. You may want to pass one of these three tests:

1. 10/30/2 test

According to user research by Microsoft Research, web visitors:

• Decide whether to stay on a page within 10 seconds
• Are likely to stay longer if they make it over the 30-second hump
• At that point, may stay as long as 2 minutes or more

These people don’t read content word by word. So make sure you create scannable content: a visual hierarchy of headings, short paragraphs, and lots of white or negative space.

2. 10/21/2 test

According to an analysis of 50,000 page views by a highly educated European audience:

• Most web visitors stay for 10 seconds or less.
• The average amount of time Americans linger on a web page is 21 seconds.
• About 10% of web views extend beyond 2 minutes.

These folks don’t read on the web. In fact, they read a total of just 20% of the words in a piece of content. Increased scannability can help them find what they are looking for as they scan any new page on your website.

3. 3/10/more test

And that University of Hamburg study? It suggests that you pass the:

3-second test. Hook visitors within two or three seconds. The first question readers ask when they land on a page is “What kind of page is this?” Is it:

• A list of products they might want to buy?
• A forum that might answer their question?
• An article with information they’re seeking?
• A form they can use to book their vacation hotel room?
• An ad?

If they can’t tell within a couple of seconds, chances are you’ll lose them altogether.

Clear page design helps. So make sure your article page looks like an article page, your forum looks like a forum and your ad looks like an ad.

Your web visitors should also grasp instantly what the page is about and why it’s relevant to them. A solid headline and deck will help you make your point quickly.

One-quarter of web pages don’t make it past the three-second scan. But if your web page does pass the three-second test, according to the German researchers, web visitors then spend about 10 seconds scanning the page.

10-second test. Inform visitors within 10 seconds. In the first 10 seconds, web visitors make a critical stay-or-go decision. They don’t dive right into the paragraphs; they scan the page to see whether it fits their needs.

Convince them that it does by lifting your key ideas off the page with scannable microcontent.

One-quarter of web pages don’t make it past that 10-second scan. But if they do stay, visitors look around a bit more.

30-second test. If visitors stay longer than 10 seconds, they look around a bit more. In the next 20 seconds — their first 30 seconds total on the page — they’re still quite likely to leave.

After 30 seconds, though, the curve becomes fairly flat. Visitors continue to leave a page, but much more slowly than they did during the first 30 seconds.

If you can get people to stay for 30 seconds, there’s a good chance that they’ll stay longer — “often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web,” Nielsen writes.

Tick tock.

What do these scanning patterns tell us? That it’s not enough to draw readers to your page through search engine optimization. Your user interface must support scanning — whether you have 60 seconds with your web visitor or only 16.

“How long will users stay on a web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same: Not very long,” Nielsen writes. “To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”

Web writers and UX designers: That’s a user experience worth aiming for.

___

Source: Jakob Nielsen, “How Long Do Users Stay on web pages?” Nielsen Norman Group, Sept. 12, 2011

Harald Weinrich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder and Matthias Mayer; “Not quite the average: An empirical study of web use,” ACM Transactions on the web (TWEB), Vol. 2 Issue 1, February 2008

Luke Wroblewski, “Communicate Quick: First Impressions Through Visual Web Design,” UIE.com, Oct. 1, 2008

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Your email recipients aren’t reading your message. They’re scanning your emails.

Indeed, according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s latest eye-tracking study, email recipients:

• Skimmed 69% of the e-zines they received
• Thoroughly read just 19% of e-zines
• Read the majority of the content of 6%
• Glanced at but did not read at all 6%

So here’s the reading technique for emails: Recipients scan pieces of information quickly, speed reading to find specific information.

“Scannability is important for websites,” writes NNG principal Jakob Nielsen, “but it’s about 50% more important for newsletters.”

Why write skimmable e-zines?

Because:

1. Recipients skim even more on mobile.

In NNG’s most recent study, mobile newsletter readers reported that they:

• Skimmed newsletters 74% of the time
• Fully read newsletters 24% of the time
• Glanced at but didn’t read 2% of the time

2. People read only 37 to 200 words of your email.

People spend just 51 seconds, on average, with an email newsletter after opening it, according to another NNG study. That’s only enough time to read about 200 words.

For sales emails, the numbers are even more brutal: People spend just 11 seconds on e-blasts, according to a 2017 report by Litmus. That’s enough time to read only about 37 words.

So which words do they read?

3. They read the microcontent.

Email newsletter subscribers in NNG eye-tracking studies read the headlines and the first line or two of the story. They often skipped the paragraphs, sometimes because they were scrolling too quickly.

Instead of reading the paragraphs, their eyes were drawn to:

• Headlines. If they could get the gist of the e-zine from the headlines and without reading the text, they were happy with the newsletter.
• First 1-2 lines of text.
• Bulleted lists. Subscribers read the first item more than subsequent items and the first words in each bullet more than subsequent words.
• Links. They’re blue and underlined, so they’re the easiest elements to skim on the screen.

Are you putting your email messages where recipients’ eyes are?

___

Sources: Mike Renahan, “The Ideal Length of a Sales Email, Based on 40 Million Emails,” HubSpot, July 11, 2018

Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

Jakob Nielsen, “Email newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion,” Alertbox, June 12, 2006

Jakob Nielsen, “Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength,” Alertbox, Feb. 17, 2004

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Online readers read shallow and deep, according to The Stanford Poynter Project: Eye Movement on the Internet, a study by Stanford University and The Poynter Institute.

So how can you give your in-depth “divers” enough information without overwhelming your casual “surfers”?

“The Internet is for everybody,” write Daniel A. Cirucci and Mark A. Tarasiewicz of the Philadelphia Bar Association. “It’s for the 30-second reader, the three-minute reader, the 30-minute reader and even the three-hour junkie.”

So how do you serve all these groups?

Write for three audience groups.

Present each message for:

• Lookers, who may give you 10 seconds. Get these folks’ attention with a sharp headline and large image.
• Skimmers, who may give you 30 seconds. Reach them through display copy: headlines, decks, subheads, links and bold-faced lead-ins, for instance.
• Readers, who may give you 2 minutes. These folks may read the paragraphs.

Writing for the Web author Crawford Kilian calls them:

• Viewers, “those looking for entertainment, who think dancing boloney is fun”
• Users, “those who go to the web to get information they need for specific purposes”
• Readers, “those who are willing to put up with poor screen resolution so that they can actually read something that interests them”

And branding guru Bob Killian suggests writing for three groups:

1. Quals, or people who just want to hear your brand story plus maybe one proof point. They make up 86% of your human audience, Killian estimates, and 86% of your best prospects, as well.

“When they land on your home page, they’ll give you 4.5 seconds to make clear we-make-widgets-that-wiggle, and we-ship-globally-in-24-hours. (One defining story, one meaningful differentiator),” he writes. “If the first paragraph is ten lines long, they bail out. If you layer on 10-reasons-why, they … bail out.”

2. Quants, or folks people who also want to know your proofs and processes.

Quants “will read the nutrition chart on the peanut butter jar, read the prospectus, read the insurance policy, and so on,” Killian writes.

“They want more than your story; they want drill-down data about ingredients, processes, testimonials, proof statements of any kind – they’ll even sit still for 10 reasons why. These data points can’t be ignored since they are 14% of your human visitors.”

3. Bots, or search engine robots. They’re looking for the same level of detail as the Quants.

How do you reach all of these folks?

Write shallow, deliver deep.

For the web, you may need to write shorter, making each web page as tight as possible. But you also need to deliver longer pieces for your deep divers.

“Open with kernels for the 30-second reader,” write Cirucci and Tarasiewicz. “Break to bits for the three-minute reader. Branch to detail for the 30-minute reader. Link to verbal and visual feasts for the three-hour junkie.”

As Eric Morgenstern, president and CEO of Morningstar Communications, counsels, offer your readers:

• USA Today level
• Wall Street Journal level
• Harvard Business Review level

Let them choose.

Or, if you, like I, are more inclined to favor a bacon analogy, think of these layers as:

• Amuse bouche
• Appetizer
• Entree

Or, as one PR pro (whose name I’ve lost) put it:

• Bite
• Snack
• Meal

For an executive speech, for instance, you might offer:

• A headline and summary blurb on the homepage
• A one-page summary of speech highlights
• The full text of the speech
• The speech in streaming audio and video

Visitors can surf as shallowly or dive as deeply as they prefer.

“There’s a story to make obvious, and drill-down stuff to make available,” Killian says. “Never confuse the two.”

Move readers up the attention ladder.

The good news is, you may be able to move these folks up the ladder of attention. If the 10-second view is interesting enough, you might turn a looker into a skimmer. If the display copy delivers real value, you might turn a skimmer into a reader.

But even if you don’t move visitors up the attention ladder, you need to reach each group where they are. You need to write for all of your readers.

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Consider the numbers:

• 43% of people skim blog posts instead of reading them, according to Hubspot.
• 55% of people spent fewer than 15 seconds on an article, ​​according to ChartBeat.
• That means people read about 50 words, on average, of a post, using an average reading rate of 200 words per minute.
• The average blog post is 1,416 words long, according to OrbitMedia.

Which means that audience members read, on average, 3.5% of the words on a post.

They don’t read the text. Instead, their “reading strategy” is to skim.

Beyond blog posts

It’s not just blog posts. People skim and scan text in other online channels and devices, as well:

• How people read on the web: They don’t; so make webpages scannable
• Do people skim, scan, read emails? Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
• People skim and scan text in online news: Only 25% read word by word
• Eye tracking online shows where people look: Change how people see your page with 6 eye gaze patterns
• People are skimming text on tablets: Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study

Which words do they read?

So how do you reach nonreaders with words? Put your message where their eyes are — in the microcontent and display copy.

So which words do they read? Your audience members look at magnetic elements, including:

• Bold-face text
• Callouts
• Captions
• Decks
• Headlines
• Links
• Lists
• Subheads

So put your message where their eyes are — in the display copy.

Pass The Palm Test.

So break up walls of words to make messages look easier to read.

In one study, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne rewrote a New York Magazine post about New York City restaurants. They added more bullets, bold-faced text, highlighted key words and white space to break up walls of words and make the message look easier to read.

Audience members spent about twice as much time with the original page. But they remembered 34% more of the content on the revised page. But they:

• Understood 12% better
• Remembered 34% more of the piece
• Enjoyed the experience significantly better

Pass The Skim Test.

In another study, Nielsen Norman Group researchers rewrote a New York Times article about Nobel Prize winners. They made the piece significantly more scannable with:

• Subheads
• Bulleted lists
• Highlighted key words

As a result, audience members:

• Spent 3% more time reading the article.
• Understood it 12% better.
• Enjoyed it 7% more.

Not a bad return on a few bullets and bold-faced words!

How can you reach people who skim through your text?

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Here’s the title of one of usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s earliest articles on writing for the web:

How Users Read on the Web

The first paragraph:

They don’t.

“People read paper,” says TJ Larkin, principal of Larkin Communications Consulting. “They use the web.”

Screen reading is different from print materials. In fact, people read word-by-word online just 16% of the time, according to eye-tracking studies by Dejan Marketing. That’s the same percentage Nielsen came up with in his eye-tracking research.

So if they’re not reading, what are they doing?

They’re not reading; they’re seeking.

Web users spend most of their time looking for something specific. According to research findings by Xerox PARC, web visitors:

• Collect 71% of the time. They search for multiple pieces of important information, maybe research for a Writing for Mobile workshop.
• Find 25%. They seek something specific, like “What is this bacalhau they want to serve me for lunch?”
• Explore 2%. They look around without a specific goal — aka “surfing.”
• Monitor 2%. They return to the same website to update information — say, checking CNN for the latest news.

In other words, web visitors have a goal 96% of the time, according to the PARC study. So much for “surfers.”

Same thing’s true on mobile. In fact, the No. 2 mobile task is searching for specific information. (No. 1: wasting time.)

Mobile visitors often seek information relevant to the here and now, like “Where is the nearest gas station?” In fact, according to a Pew study, some 49% of mobile users use their phones for location-based information.

How long do they spend?

So as they look for information, how much time do visitors spend on webpages? Not too long:

• The average page visit lasts less than a minute — but many are 10 seconds or less.
• 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website.
• Visitors spend an average of 19 seconds looking at a webpage.

During that time, according to Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, authors of How People Read on the Web, web visitors’ eyes land an average of 72 times on different elements on the page. (Learn more about these reading patterns, including the F-shaped pattern, where visitors’ eyes sweep across the left side of the page.)

“As you watch users’ eyes negotiate pages at mind-blowing speeds, you might think that … it is just pure luck that anyone ever finds anything worthwhile on the web.”

— Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, in How People Read on the Web

Let’s do that math: 19 seconds divided by 72 “eye stops” equals about a quarter of a second per glance.

Definitely. Not. Reading.

“As you watch users’ eyes negotiate pages at mind-blowing speeds,” write Pernice et al., “you might think that … it is just pure luck that anyone ever finds anything worthwhile on the web.”

How much do they read?

As web visitors’ eyes race around your webpage for 10 to 20 seconds or so, how much of your content are they actually reading?

About 20% of the words on the page, according to a Nielsen Norman Group analysis of 50,000 page views that European computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, engineers and other highly educated professionals completed while going about their daily lives.

“What’s important about this study is that it was completely naturalistic,” Nielsen writes. “The users didn’t have to do anything special.”

Here’s what he found:

• On average, web visitors read half the information on webpages with 111 words or less.
• As the word count goes up, so too does the amount of time visitors spend on a page. But reading time doesn’t keep up with the additional word count. Web visitors spend only 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. Assuming an average reading time of 200 words per minute, that’s only about 15% of the additional words.
• Web visitors spent enough time to read at most 28% of the words on a webpage during an average visit. However, Nielsen says, they don’t spend all that time reading. It’s more likely, he estimates, that visitors read only 20% of the words on the average webpage.

But which 20%?

Where are they looking?

So which words do they read? The microcontent, or online display copy.

In a study by Conversion XL, here’s where web visitors focused their attention:

• 97% read headlines. They averaged 2.9 seconds, which gave them time to read 7 words, according to the researchers.
• 98% read decks, or the one-sentence summary under the headline. They spent 2.8 seconds, or about 7 words.
• More than 90% viewed captions.

Web visitors also look at the:

• Subheads
• Links
• Bulleted lists
• Bold-faced text

And if you want to reach web visitors, that’s where you’ll put your messages.

_____

Sources: Jakob Nielsen, “How Users Read on the Web,” Nielsen Norman Group, Oct. 1, 1997

“Here’s Why Nobody Reads Your Content,” Dejan Marketing, June 11, 2015

Kathryn Whitenton, “Satisficing: Quickly Meet Users’ Main Needs,” Neilsen Norman Group, March 30, 2014

Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat; “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong,” Time, March 9, 2014

Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen; How People Read on the Web; Neilsen Norman Group

Jakob Nielsen, “How Little Do Users Read?” Alertbox, May 6, 2008

Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer; “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of web use,” ACM Transactions on the web,vol. 2, no. 1, February 2008, article #5

Madeleine Sidoff, “How People Read Short Articles [Original Research],” ConversionXL.com, Jan.19, 2018

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Here’s a paradox: 1) Reading is the No. 1 thing people do on websites. 2) People try to read as little as possible on most of the sites they visit.

Instead of reading, they skim the surface of your page, trying to find what they’re looking for. Or so say eye trackers Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, the authors of How People Read on the Web.

They should know. The authors conducted online eye-tracking research on more than 300 people using hundreds of different websites to view 1.5 million eye movements. These webcam-based eye-tracking studies show how users experience screen-based information in real time.

This data collection showed that web visitors skim in one of five key gaze patterns. On mobile devices, another set of researchers found, they skim in a sixth pattern.

So how do these eye-tracking tests show that your readers are looking at your webpage? In one or more of these ways:

1. F-shaped eye-gazing pattern

What happens? Visitors rely on visual signposts, like subheads, to guide their skimming. No signposts? No guidance.

Why? Without signposts, visitors skim in a path that forms the letter F. That is, they read most of the way across the first few lines, then read less and less of each subsequent line.

How to help? Add magnetic elements to help guide visitors’ eyes. Those include headlines, decks, subheads, links bold-faced lead-ins, bulleted lists and highlighted key words.

2. Spotted eye-gazing pattern

What happens? Visitors rely on visual signposts, like subheads, to guide their skimming. No signposts? No guidance.

Why? If you haven’t provided elements that help web visitors find their way, those visitors try to spot keywords that might answer the question they’ve brought to your webpage. They look, specifically, at all caps, numerals, long words, colored text, links, and quotation marks and parentheses.

How to help? Add magnetic elements — headlines, decks, subheads, links, bulleted lists, bold-faced lead-ins or highlighted key words — to help guide visitors’ eyes. Those elements will help visitors find what they’re looking for — and avoid letting their spotted-gazing defense mechanism set in.

3. Layer cake eye-gazing pattern

What happens? It’s a piece of cake to skim a webpage that layers on white space, subheads and blocks of text.

Why? Readers go for the frosting, making their way down the page by skimming subheads. If the section is relevant, they’ll read; if not, they skip.

How to help? To encourage this efficient skimming pattern, organize pages into sections, then label those sections with clear subheads. And use formatting to make subheads stand out.

4. Bypassing eye-gazing pattern

What happens? Sometimes — not typically — visitors skip the first part of the text on the left of the webpage.

Why? Visitors skip repetitive information (like repeated words in a list), sections that might be blah-blah text (like welcome text on websites) or words that look less important than the other words on your page (sections that are formatted differently, for instance).

How to help? Don’t repeat words in a list. Write an intro that says something. And use consistent formatting to avoid signaling that some sections are less important.

5. Mobile eye-gazing pattern

What happens? Mobile visitors look at search engine results pages the same way they look at a TV: They focus on the center screen.

Why? They spend 86% of their time on the center, top two-thirds of the screen.

How to help? Meet them in the middle: Design mobile webpages to put the most important material front and center.

6. Commitment eye-gazing pattern

What happens? Sometimes — “in far less-common cases” — visitors read some or all of your webpage.

Why? Visitors commit to pages that are:

• Interesting to them, provide a benefit or make them feel good about reading
• Skimmable and that make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for
• Credible and thorough

How to help? Write about a topic readers are interested in; focus on reader benefits and entertainment; design the page to be easy to skim.

Mix and match.

Visitors might use several — even all — of these patterns on a single page. They might, for instance, start by skimming the subheads in a layer-cake pattern, get interested in one section and read that in a commitment pattern.

Understanding these patterns can help you create webpages that help people find what they’re looking for. But some of these ways are better than others. (You don’t want to get an F on your webpage, after all.)

The good news is, you can change visitors’ eyetracking patterns by improving the writing and layout of your webpage.

3 ways to change readers’ paths through your page

To help visitors get more from your webpage, Pernice et al. suggest that you tweak:

1. Page layout. A simple, consistent, chunked-up layout makes your webpage easier to scan, which increases scanning. Make sure your webpage is:

• Easy to scan. Use headings and spacing to break up the text. List lists. Divide the content into obvious chunks, then label the chunks with subheads and sub-subheads.
• Predictably designed. Use page templates and cascading style sheets to ensure consistent subhead, link and table treatments and other design elements throughout the site.

2. Writing. Make sure your message is:

• Relevant, compelling and thorough
• Enticing, with fascinating facts and stories
• Readable, with short paragraphs, sentences and words
• Accessible — not too technical
• Conversational — sounds the way you speak
• Authoritative and trustworthy

3. User motivation. User motivators include interest, desire, need — even a threat. Ask:

• Do readers want or need to read your page?
• Will there be a quiz? Or is there some other reason they must read now?
• Does your page offer a reader benefit?
• Is your page simply so enjoyable that readers can’t stop scanning?

And, how credible is your site? If your site is highly credible — if a friend strongly recommended it, if it showed up at the top of a search engine results page or if the visitor has had a great experience on other pages on your site — that can motivate stronger scanning, as well.

___

Sources: Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton, and Jakob Nielsen; How People Read on the Web: The Eyetracking Evidence; Nielsen Norman Group; Sept. 10, 2013

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