People read more online than in print
Posted 4 April 2007 at 9:51AM by Simon Dickson in Website development
Readers on the internet have zero attention-span, right? Er, wrong, according to a major new investigation. If anything, they're more attentive than people reading printed material.
The Florida-based Poynter Institute journalism school runs a regular study called 'Eyetrack', using tiny cameras to follow readers' gaze as they look at newspapers or news websites. The information is recorded on computer, and can paint a revealing picture of what people actually look at, and for how long. The results help designers optimise their work, and can sometimes be surprising.
The findings from Poynter's 2007 research are due to be revealed later this month at a conference, but a few snippets have sneaked out. Perhaps the most intriguing is that, contrary to most previous assumptions, online readers tend to read more text than print readers.
The study showed that an average 77% of story text was read online, compared to 62% in a broadsheet print format, and 57% in tabloid. (Bear in mind it's a US study, so terms like 'broadsheet' and 'tabloid' don't mean quite the same as in the UK.) And nearly two-thirds of online readers, once they had chosen to read a particular article, read all the way to the end.
They also found that big headlines and photographs didn't attract the attention of online readers, as they do in print. Instead, online readers were drawn to 'directional elements' such as navigation bars and teasers.
Although it's US-based research and primarily aimed at journalists, there are useful lessons here for anyone involved in producing websites or other marketing materials. This short video presents some of the main conclusions; fuller details will appear later in April, followed by the report's full publication in June.
Tags: eyetrack, poynter, web design
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1. At April 11, 2007 1:04 PM, Modwenna Rees-Mogg wrote: