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From ONEList June 2006 (ONE/Northwest and CommEn Space)

Do you have an email newsletter? If so, then usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s latest studies of users’ eye movements across web pages is compelling visual evidence of how people read on the web, and how it is different from how they read print.

Nielsen draws three key conclusions for online writing:

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.

• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.

• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words

that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.