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
Reach readers online
How to write a top level page for your website
Craft your website’s tables of content
When searching on a drop-down menu, web visitors should either:
- Start at the top and move linearly down to the bottom of the menu (EPIC model)
- Randomly search the menu (ACT-R model)
Or so say classic models of cognitive processing.… Read the full article
Site for sore eyes
Online reading causes dry eyes, blurred vision
Thanks to our obsession with screens, there’s now a diagnosis known as digital eyestrain. (Not to be confused with screen sightedness.)… Read the full article
Avoid ‘brilliant images of fuzzy concepts’
Visitors tune out superfluous pictures
When BNSF Railroad put a photo of a train on its homepage, visitors ignored it.
Moreover, they had trouble finding the top stories they were looking for.… Read the full article
Clicking takes a counterpunch
Communicators slug it out for scrolling
The latest brawl in Web design pits the Scrollers against the Clickers.
Clickers argue for:
- More, shorter webpages
- Clicking to and between those pages vs.
Do they see what you see?
Put like things together to avoid online tunnel vision
Web visitors don’t see things that are right on the screen. Selective attention makes them overlook elements that are outside their focus of interest.… Read the full article
Want status updates to go viral? Avoid small talk
Skip product promos, irrelevant twaddle
Which of these Facebook posts is most likely to increase engagement?
“We’re pleased to introduce our latest WhatzIts.”
“Try these three ways to build your business using WhatzIts.”
… Read the full articleSpread yourself thin
Self-reference is not retweetable
The more you tweet about yourself, the fewer retweets you’ll get. Or so says Dan Zarrella, HubSpot viral marketing scientist.
In research published in 2012, Zarrella compared tweets that had been retweeted with those that had not.… Read the full article