
How People Read Online: New and Old Findings - adamfard
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/
======
danohuiginn
"Lawn-mower pattern" is their new phrase for when people skim content left-to-
right, then drop down to the next line and go right-to-left, until they get
back to the beginning.

I LOVE this. Why? Because it so perfectly replicates a metaphor from ancient
Greece. Some early manuscripts were written the same way. Write the first line
left-to-right, then the next line is right-to-left, then flip again.

They called this "Ox-turn" writing (boustrophedonic), because it's like the
pattern you make when plowing a field. We don't use oxen much any more, but we
do use lawnmowers. So the same phrase comes back!

[http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-
bou1.htm](http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-bou1.htm)

~~~
082349872349872
Oxen plowing fields is probably also why the canonical acre is a rectangular,
not square, measure. (1 furlong x 1 chain)

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sosuke

      Several participants in our study began reading articles
      nearly linearly and completely until they hit a pull 
      quote or inline ad. After reaching one of those elements,
      the participants abandoned their reading and fell into
      light scanning.
    

I never noticed but I do that every time.

~~~
taejo
I dislike pull quotes in magazines for this reason, but I understand their
purpose. Online, distracting the reader and messing up the reading-order seems
to be the _only_ thing they do.

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gnicholas
If you're interested in visual tracking and reading, you might like the color
gradient-based reading tool called BeeLine Reader.[1] It seeks to remediate
the same problems as boustrophedon, but does so with color instead of reversed
writing.

A study done by CNET and covered in The Atlantic showed that people reading
with this color-based technique ended up reading significantly more text than
people reading plain black text.[2]

note: I am the founder, and we got our start via a surprisingly successful
Show HN post!

1: [http://www.beelinereader.com](http://www.beelinereader.com)

2:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-bett...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-better-
way-to-read/482127/)

~~~
DavidVoid
What a neat idea, almost surprised I haven't seen something like it before.

I get that for print it's historically been best to just stick with black text
on a white background, but for computer text I feel like this kind of
technology should've been able to exist in the 90s.

~~~
gnicholas
> _I feel like this kind of technology should 've been able to exist in the
> 90s._

Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, has talked about the possibility
that there have been any notable innovations that ‘came too late’.

In particular, he talks about the wheeled suitcase, which at first glance
seems to have come decades too late. But he ultimately concludes that the
weight that would have been added by metal wheels and enclosures were
unnecessary at previous times, when airports were much smaller. As far as I
know, he doesn’t have any other candidates for technologies that came too
late.

But I think that this the BeeLine technology could fit the bill.

------
Theodores
I think this topic needs some explanation for older people that do not believe
people that use the web extensively actually read.

Because people scan a page rather than read every word in the order the author
thought best does not devalue what is going on.

Say you were interested in WW2 history you could read Stalingrad by Antony
Beevor to then become an expert on that aspect of the war. Or you could
research the topic online going across many online sources to answer your own
questions. This latter approach where no book is read from cover to cover has
a lot of merit. However, some older people might call this not reading. To
them this would be grazing any old nonsense written online.

We need to challenge these entrenched attitudes. It is totally okay to study
online flitting about between content and sources. Reading online is different
to reading books and we should not be concerned with how people do this in
order to make condescending remarks.

~~~
libertine
I'm curious, what "older people" do you consider that believe that?

Because the "older people" I know that use the web (in their 60's), they
actually commit to read the few articles/blogs/news they choose to read.

They are far from heavy users, their web browsing is probably limited to
1-2hours max.

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grawprog
Reading this made me feel like the odd one out or something. I'll read an
article start to finish, read tables by row and generally do things in a left
to right pattern. I ignore sidebars, headers and footers, especially ones that
don't scroll and generally read content in a linear order and pick one topic
at a time until I finish it.

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noja
Boustrophedonic mode on Kindle please!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Bous...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Boustrophedon.png)

~~~
vmception
wow who designed that page such that closing the fullscreen image goes to the
prior page. There is no way to get to the wiki article from that image lol

~~~
dublinben
The "X" button correctly returns to the wiki page if it was opened in a new
tab / window so there's no prior page to return to.

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awinter-py
the image for 'pinball pattern' made me briefly nauseous

this is every annoying recirc where I get dragged down the sidebar and then
put a piece of paper in front of the monitor to control myself

daily mail-ization, parallel columns

total loss off control

------
davidjnelson
Summary:

“Design content that doesn’t waste people’s time and effort which directs
people to only the information they want.”

