Jakob Nielsen’s recent Alertbox article has some interesting things to say about how users read on the Web.
Our newest usability study…tests how well users understand the first 11 characters of a website’s links and headlines.
Why test text that’s so severely truncated? Because online reading is often dominated by the F-pattern. That is, people read the first few listed items somewhat thoroughly — thus the cross-bars of the “F” — but read less and less as they continue down the list, eventually passing their eyes down the text’s left side in a fairly straight line. At this point, users see only the very beginning of the items in a list…
Users typically see about 2 words for most list items; they’ll see a little more if the lead words are short, and only the first word if they’re long.
Nielsen calls these first 11 characters “nanocontent”. I’ve seen this same idea about “F”-shaped scanning in “heatmaps” showing the “golden triangle” for people looking at a search results page, on Google for instance.
This graphic from a Google eyetracking study shows something that looks remarkably like an “F” pattern.
In the numbers I’ve seen, 80-100% of the users look at the first couple of listings in the search results entries, and engagement then degrades dramatically as you go down the page—with only the first couple words being scanned.
This has at least the following implications in guidelines for a variety of labeling tasks, from how to label links in a site information architecture to what to put in the browser title for search engine optimization purposes to how to write your bulleted lists.
- Clarity. Make sure that the text at the head of your list item clearly expresses what the fuller list item is about
- Interest. If possible, make those few characters interesting. Make them count and draw the user into looking at the rest of the list item.
- Efficiency. Avoid throwaway words like “Here’s where you’ll find…”. Get to the point.
