

Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008) - Audiophilip
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp

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z0r
The results of the study are a bit counter-intuitive for me. I prefer to read
and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to read programs with
longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading articles and software is to
great to expect the same kind of outcome. In any case I don't think 95 cpl is
an extreme enough line length to be really interesting. It would have been
nice if they had run the study with more testing points at longer and longer
lines until they found a point where reading speed dropped or comprehension
suffered (if there is such a point, maybe not?)

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JimDabell
> I prefer to read and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to
> read programs with longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading
> articles and software is to great to expect the same kind of outcome.

Maybe the characters per line is not the relevant data point. The fact that
there are so many studies that give wildly varying results using this measure
seems to be a strong indicator that this is the case.

They chose specific font metrics, and used a single monitor at a single
distance in a single context, so they have no way of knowing whether it was
the physical width, the pixels per degree, or some other factor that they were
actually measuring.

Think of it this way: if they had doubled the text size, that would
undoubtedly have resulted in far wider line lengths in physical terms, yet the
characters per line would have remained the same. If they rigged the
conditions so the physical width and characters per line were fixed in
lockstep, were they measuring responses to the number of characters per line,
or were they really measuring responses to physical width? There's no way of
knowing with this study.

Any study like this that could usefully be applied to the web needs to take
into account varying font sizes and all the other things that make the web
different from print. Fixed font sizes in pt is not how the web operates.

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Audiophilip
A quick attempt to format the text on the page (via Stylish) to approximate
the 95 character per line count recommended by the study:
[https://userstyles.org/styles/109432/the-effects-of-line-
len...](https://userstyles.org/styles/109432/the-effects-of-line-length-on-
reading-online-news)

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planckscnst
A study with 20 students? This is useless.

~~~
pekk
Is it more useless than shooting from the hip with completely uninformed
opinions?

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sadfaceunread
You could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more
noise) pretty easily.

~~~
gwern
I agree, formatting details seem to be very context-specific and this is a lab
setup, not in the wild. I would trust much more some AB test results from the
NYT or any media organization - line length is one of the most obvious things
to test!

I tested page-widths (which forces line length) on my own site, using n=109k
visitors (so, quite a bit larger than n=20):
[http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-
redux](http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux) A wide - but not the
widest - version performed best.

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rbrogan
Any guesses as to why this would be so? My guess is that people thought they
were reading faster at fewer words per line because there was less effort
involved. If it were so, I wonder what it should mean for usability? Should
you engineer things so that your users are more effective or so that they
believe they are more effective?

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Animats
The result was that the highest reading speed was at the longest line length
they tried, 95 characters. They should have tried longer line lengths until
the reading speed dropped again. All they can say now is that the maximum
speed was achieved at a line length of 95 or greater.

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dangpzanco
Ironically, the html version of the text has 305 character long lines on a
1080p monitor =P.

