Designing for the scan reader.
 
Gerry McGovern, gerry@gerrymcgovern.com


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Summary: People have become incredibly selective in how they consume information. To be effective web readers, people have developed ‘scan reading’ behavior. Gerry McGovern provides several design guidelines for scan readers that are applicable to both corporate intranets and online reports.

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As the volume of information rapidly expands, the time to read this information remains relatively static. There are only twenty-four hours in the day; only so much attention to go around. How are you going to get people to read your content? Understanding and planning for how people scan read on the Web is a good start.

A Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than was published in the entire 15th Century. Every year, there are 60,000 books and 18,000 magazines published in the United States alone. The Web contains some 600 billion documents.

To survive information overload, people have become incredibly selective in how they consume information. The Web and its corporate sister the intranet, are the ultimate information overload environments. To be effective in this environment, people have developed 'scan reading' behavior.

Consider the following:

• A four-year long Stanford-Poynter eye tracking study, published in 2000, found that the first thing people look at on a web page tends to be text, and that they read "shallow but wide."
  
• 'Examining user expectations for the location of common e-commerce web objects,' a study by Michael Bernard, published in January 2002, found that for e-commerce objects such as the Home link, the Login/Register, Help/Service, etc., "there was a general consensus among participants on location. It is certainly probable, then, that placing these objects in expected locations would give an e-commerce site a competitive edge over those that do not place them in their expected locations."
  
• "79% of our test users always scanned any new page; only 16% read word by word," wrote Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, in a study published in 1997.
  
• "Business readers are skimmers; many go weeks at a time without reading a paragraph all the way through," wrote E. Weiss, in 'How to write usable user documentation.'
  
• “Users tend to scan, stopping only when they find something interesting. Users struggle to find alternatives to reading. They resort to a modified scan strategy and usually read the first sentence and/or scan for links on the page," according to Usability.gov.
  
• "Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success," according to Thomas Davenport and John Beck in their book, 'The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.'
  

It is important to design your website so that it facilitates scan reading. Here are a number of scan reading design guidelines:

• Maximize familiarity: Structure your website in a way that is familiar and consistent. This will mean that the reader has less to learn and can more easily focus on the core content. For example, most people expect to find the 'Home' link in the top left of the page. Placing it anywhere else makes it more difficult for them to scan.
  
• Design from shallow to deep: A homepage should contain short text that brings the reader deeper into the website. As they link deeper you can provide more detailed content.
  
• Classify well: Choosing classification terms that are readily understandable to the reader is crucial.
  
• Write punchy headings and summaries: If the heading is not descriptive and compelling, the reader will likely leave.
  
• Be direct: Be short. Get to the point. Explain in precise, simple language exactly what you have to say to the reader.

Don't waste the reader's time. Remember, the one word that best describes the scan reader is -- impatient.


Related links:

Usability.gov http://usability.gov/guidelines/readscan.html#two

Stanford-Poynter eye tracking study http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000/

Examining user expectations for the location of common e-commerce web objects' study
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/41/web_object-ecom.htm
 
 
 
Background:
Gerry McGovern is an internationally acclaimed content management consultant, speaker and author. His two most recent books are Content Critical and The Web Content Style Guide. Knowledge Management Review described Content Critical as a "bible" of content management." www.gerrymcgovern.com


 
Reprinted from: ‘New Thinking.” Volume 7 number 17, April 29, 2002.


SCIP.online, volume 1 number 11, June 18, 2002.