Sean Sharp’s ITRT Blog

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind - ChronicleReview.com
When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times “the guru of Web page ‘usability,’” Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people’s online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages “in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.” It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. “F for fast,” Nielsen wrote in a column. “That’s how users read your precious content.”

I read this article recently and it got me to thinking about how we design web sites and pages. I also find this type of research really intriguing and interesting, believe it or not. As we consider how the web is used and how we use the web it is important to consider how people read while online. I wonder if the way we read web pages changes as humans age. In other words, does a first grader read a page the same way a high school student does, or a middle aged person does? Hopefully more research will be done in this area and the evolution of our interaction with online worlds will improve. Now, please go and remove anything located in the lower right corner of your website. No one will notice it, anyways.

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