People find it difficult to concentrate online
Most Americans spend at least 8.5 hours a day looking at a screen, whether a TV set, computer monitor or mobile device, according to a study by Ball State University.… Read the full article
Online communications
Reading paper vs. computer screen
Reading online hurts readers’ eyes, their bodies, their brains
I don’t know about you, but one of my goals in life is to never write anything that makes my readers throw up, resign or forget where they parked their car.… Read the full article
World technology literacy skills: bad and getting worse
21% of adults are technologically illiterate
Just 7% of adults around the world can manage conflicting requests to reserve a meeting room using a reservation system, then email people to let them know whether they got the room they requested.… Read the full article
Skimming, scanning and close reading
Get the word out to lookers, skimmers & readers
Online readers read shallow and deep, according to The Stanford Poynter Project: Eye Movement on the Internet, a study by Stanford University and The Poynter Institute.… Read the full article
Do people skim, scan, read emails?
Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
Your email recipients aren’t reading your message. They’re scanning your emails.
Indeed, according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s latest eye-tracking study, email recipients:
- Skimmed 69% of the e-zines they received
- Thoroughly read just 19% of e-zines
- Read the majority of the content of 6%
- Glanced at but did not read at all 6%
So here’s the reading technique for emails: Recipients scan pieces of information quickly, speed reading to find specific information.… Read the full article
People skim through the text of blog posts
They read 3.5% of the words on the page
Consider the numbers:
- 43% of people skim blog posts instead of reading them, according to Hubspot.
- 55% of people spent fewer than 15 seconds on an article, according to ChartBeat.
People skim and scan text in online news
Only 19% read word-by-word
This just in: “Readers” actually don’t do much reading.
Indeed, just 19% of participants in a 2012 Harris Interactive poll read articles word-by-word.… Read the full article
How people read on the web
They don’t; so make webpages scannable
Here’s the title of one of usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s earliest articles on writing for the web:
How Users Read on the Web
The first paragraph:
They don’t.
… Read the full articlePeople are skimming text on tablets
Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study
Call it the bailout point.
People reading news on an iPad spent an average of 78.3 seconds on stories that they didn’t finish.… Read the full article
‘Readers’ are skimming and scanning online
Web visitors spend only a few seconds on a webpage
Tick tock. Visitors spend less than four seconds on 25% of the web pages they visit, according to a study by University of Hamburg and University of Hannover researchers.… Read the full article