While this week’s lecture concentrated on typography and the importance of selecting the right typefaces and typesetting them correctly, we were also guided to this article https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ from the Nieslen Norman Group about how people actually read web content. I thought this would be a very useful article to read in-depth to help me make the best decisions when deciding how to layout my text content for this module’s project telling the narrative of the Apollo Space Program.
“Summary: They don't. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.”
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ Last Accessed 14/02/2024
Well, that’s it then, people don’t read web pages, so it doesn’t matter how we lay those pages out, or what typography we use, just highlight the key sentences and that’s all. Well no, while as this article based on a number of eye-tracking studies by the Nielsen Norman Group did find that most people don’t read every word of a webpage, how we layout the text and typeset it can make a huge difference to what they can take away from the page.
This study found that clear objective language, reducing the word count and formatting the information for easy scanning all increased the usability of a web page and the use of all three techniques increase the usability by 124% which is a huge amount for what amounts to some simple changes.
The thing is that study and the accompanying article were published in 1997, a lot has changed in web design and the habits of our users in that time, how has that effected how users read on the web now?
Well, the Nielsen Norman Group have continued to study how people read on the web and in 2020 published this article https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/?lm=how-users-read-on-the-web&pt=article alongside the second edition of there in-depth report based on all the studies they have carried out over the years. So, what has changed, well in terms of the overall behaviour not a lot, users still tend to scan rather than read web pages and using techniques like those above still make content more usable and therefore better for users.
Some things have changed in the main how we design web content and how we display the information, in the first study it was found that the most common style of scanning web content was F-pattern scanning where users scanned the left side (the start of the text) more, occasionally scanning over the width of the page if something caught their eye leaving an eye tracking map in the shape of an F.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/?lm=how-users-read-on-the-web&pt=article Last Accessed 14/02/24
What was observed in the more recent study was two new styles of scanning the Lawnmower Pattern and the Pinball Pattern.
The Lawnmower scanning style is where a user starts on the left then scans across a row before dropping down and scanning from right to left and so on. This style has come about because of a web design trend called the Z-shaped or zig-zag layout where there are two columns with the text and imagery alternating between the left and right columns with each row.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/?lm=how-users-read-on-the-web&pt=article Last Accessed 14/02/24
The pinball pattern was observed when users looked at the results from search engines (such as Google or Bing) which now display their content in a more interesting way than the lists of websites of before. Search results now often include images, shopping and answers to common questions relating to the search term. This has led to people’s gaze moving all over the screen as different elements catch their attention much like a pinball in a machine bouncing around inside a machine, with no clear pattern.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/?lm=how-users-read-on-the-web&pt=article Last Accessed 14/02/24
There was one other finding from this study which I felt would be relevant to my work and this was that the use of pull-quotes often disrupted users reading. It was observed that users would be reading content word for word until they reached the pull quote and then stop before adopting a scan technique for the rest of the text. As in the project I am working on there is some very significant pull quotes I will need to think carefully about how I use and format these.