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BUSINESS GAZETTE, March, 2001 An eye-opening look at Web sites The chances are that you won’t make it to the end of this article. Research has shown, however, that the nature by which you digest information will vary markedly according to whether you are reading it offline (eg. in the newspaper) or online on the internet. Eyetrack studies at the Poynter Institute and Stanford University have highlighted key differences in the behaviour of reading habits of the two media. “So what?” you might ask. Well, having an understanding of these reading habits is useful to anyone thinking of getting a Web site, or for anyone that already has a Web site but perhaps hasn't previously considered such an issue. To date, Web sites are almost never designed to comply with the way users behave online. With the aid of small, lightweight cameras which are head- mounted and track the way online readers’ eyes scan Web sites, a number of interesting findings have emerged. Firstly, and perhaps rather surprisingly, the studies have shown that online readers are attracted to text before graphical content. The reverse is true for readers of newspapers and magazines. Of users’ first eye-fixations upon a Web page, 78% were upon text rather than graphics. An additional finding has been that people are far more likely to limit their reading to a short brief as opposed to reading an article in full. When clicking upon a link for a specific online article, an internet user will typically read 75% of the piece. Print readers, on the other hand, read less than 30% of each article. That means the likelihood of you still reading this depends largely on which medium you are using! Subjects were also found to switch from one Web site to another. By having multiple browsers running at once (known in the study as ‘interlaced browsing’), people tend to alternate between different sites, perhaps waiting for one page to load whilst reading another. The lesson here for Web site designers is that people are not necessarily focussed on any one Web site. While further research could prove important to designers’ decisions about whether online content is best presented on long, scrollable pages or on shorter pages that require the user to click to a new page, the findings to date show that most subjects used the scroll bar and back button to navigate through content. An appreciation of online reading habits is clearly important for Web design. For example, site design must accommodate people who leave and return frequently and so it must be designed to help users easily reorient themselves. This might be achieved by using plain and simple headlines that immediately tell users what each page is about. One final finding has been the fallacy of the prediction that the Web would replace newspapers. Online newsreaders don’t cancel their newspaper subscriptions but many non-newspaper readers do read news online. In the same way that neither radio nor television replaced newspapers, nor will the internet, so we should all be able to continue to enjoy reading Business Gazette for many years to come… More information about the Stanford Poynter Project can be found at http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000
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