READING ON THE WEB
How do people read on the web? According to Jakob Nielsen, author of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (Pearson, 2001) and holder of 71 patents relating to making the Internet easier to use, “They don’t.”
Yes, you read that correctly. People don’t read online. They scan.
Nielsen, together with John Morkes, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Trilogy Software and, like Nielsen, a usability expert, conducted several scientific studies about reading and writing on the web. They discovered that people read webpages very differently than printed pages. In 1997, they reported that the majority (79 percent) skim webpages quickly (stopping only when something interesting catches their eye); only 16 percent ...
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