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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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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