April 29, 2002 New Thinking:
How you can design for the scan reader

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• A four-year long Stanford-Poynter eye tracking study, published in 2000, found that the first thing people look at on webpage tends to be text, and that they read "shallow but wide."
• 'Examining user expectations for the location of common ecommerce web objects,' a study by Michael Bernard, published in January 2002, found that for ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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.

Gerry McGovern

Related links
Usability.gov

Stanford-Poynter eye tracking study

'Examining user expectations for the location of common ecommerce web objects' study
 

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