Jenny Fredette Creative Communications

If you haven’t heard by now, web users don’t exactly read the content on your website. Sure, their eyes do see the words and their minds understand the overall meaning, but their method is anything but traditional.

Web users are scanners. Their eyes dart across the screen at rapid speeds. They absorb headlines, colored/bold items, and meaning-rich words in order to get a grasp on each webpage they view.

According to Jakob Nielson, affectionately known as the “Web usability guru,” the vast majority of web users actually look at websites in an F pattern. His researchers actually tracked eye movements to show that web users

1. First, scan the page horizontally at the top.
2. Secondly, scan a second time horizontally, this time for a shorter length across the screen.
3. Finally, scan down vertically.

So what does this mean for you? Nielson lays it out very clearly:

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under web writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.