How Do People Read Webpages? (Internet Marketers, Copywriters and Web Designers Listen Up!)
By Anna Johnson on April 17th, 2009According to Jakob Nielsen, web users typically read webpages according to an ‘F-pattern’. They tend to fully read the first few items at the top of a page before reading just the first couple of words of everything else listed on the page.
As you can imagine, this has big implications for how you arrange information on a webpage…
Jakob Nielsen is one of the pioneers of web usability (and a guy who remains steadfast in his ‘no Flash, no images’ approach to web design). Even if you don’t entirely agree with him, Jakob’s observations are a ‘must know’ for all Internet marketers, copywriters and web designers.
Jakob has found that web visitors typically read the first few items on a webpage in full… but as they continue down the page they tend to pass their eyes in a straight line, where they will only see the beginning sections of each item.
Depending on the type of webpage in question, ‘item’ means a search engine result, heading, sentence, paragraph, product blurb, bullet point or numbered list item, or any kind of other text-based content.
Furthermore, Jakob Nielsen says that web users generally see the first two words of any given list item – more if the lead words are short, just one if the lead word is long.
In fact, this observation led him to conduct a test in which people were asked to predict the destination of a given web link based on seeing just 11 characters of the link text.
Jakob acknowledges that 11 characters is somewhat arbitrary and that, in real life, links aren’t truncated to 11 characters (implying that a user would probably read complete words rather than part-words). He chose 11 characters, however, so that each item of link text could be compared based on the same character length.
In any case, the results of the study confirmed just how important those first few characters or words are in getting a web visitor to take a desired action (such as clicking on a link) based on what they think they will get by clicking on that link.
When it comes to link text in particular, the take-outs for Internet marketers are to:
- Be as descriptive as possible in the first two words of a link in order to allow users to confidently (and correctly) predict what they’ll get by clicking.
- Clearly differentiate links from each other so that people don’t assume they point to the same page. (Interestingly, using a lot of different anchor text for the same links may be good for search engine optimization (SEO)… but confusing for users.)
- Don’t mislead or ‘promise too much’.
When it comes to copy in general, it seems that Internet marketers, copywriters and web designers should aim to give users the most important information upfront.
