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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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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Want to write better, easier and faster? Get clicked, read, liked and shared? Otherwise boost your writing skills?

As we plan our upcoming Master Classes, I’ve been creating a lot of new slides. Here’s a sneak peek at some of my favorites.

1. Make messages colorful with concrete details. Fun facts and juicy details might seem like the Cheez Doodles and Cronuts of communication: tempting, for sure, but a little childish and not particularly good for you.

But in fact they boost understanding, increase credibility, help people remember your message and move people to act. Add color to every piece you write with these nutritious elements.

2. Put your effort up top. Most writers spend very little time getting ready to write, more time writing and the most time fixing what they’ve written. But comma-jockeying ain’t writing, and the result is some pretty tepid prose. Write Better, Easier and Faster when you turn the writing process on its head.

3. Stop agonizing over the right length for your blog post. Over-the-counter tools like SEMRush analyze successful posts to let you know what Google will rank for your search term. Get word length, keywords to use, readability levels and more. Plus, find out how many words people really read on social media channels.

4. Lead with the benefits … substantiate with the features. Write about what readers can do with your products, services, programs and ideas — not about the products, services, programs and ideas themselves. The result: You’ll draw readers in and move them to act.

5. Are you addressing your email envelope? Recipients use four elements — the sender, subject line, preheader text and preview pane — to decide whether to open or delete your email or report it as spam. So if you’re just crafting your subject line, you’re ignoring 75% of the elements that readers use to determine whether to open.

To increase open rates, address all four elements of the envelope — not just the subject line.

6. Avoid the worst news release quote clichés. We know your VP is overcome with emotion over your latest Whatzit. But instead of quoting executives about how delighted, pleased, excited and thrilled they are, write how users are benefitting from your product, service, program or idea. The result: sound bites journalists will use and readers will read.

7. Reach readers where they are, not where you wish they were. Most Americans have basic or below-basic reading skills. That means that if you write at the 11th-grade reading level, you’ll miss 97% of Americans. Use readability statistics to make your message easier to read — for all of your audience members.

8. People spend half the time on your webpage when they’re using a smartphone. To get the message across on the small screen, write shorter paragraphs, sentences and words. Are you getting your message across on the mobile web?

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