
How Little Do Users Read? - chaostheory
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html
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mosburger
TL;DR

OK - I'm joking (sort of). I do think it's telling that he finishes the
article with this:

"Clearly, the average visitor won't make it too far through most of my
articles. But I've consciously targeted a small, elite readership with a firm
commitment to usability. If you target a broader audience or have sales cycles
that are shorter than 5 years, you'd be wise to put your word count on a
strict diet."

I think this actually says more than the pretty graphs and statistical
dissection. Know your target audience. And for most of us, our target audience
has a very short attention span. From his second graph, it looks like the
sweet spot is a bit under 100 words. Yikes!

~~~
bootload
_"... From his second graph, it looks like the sweet spot is a bit under 100
words ..."_

Maybe this is why Amazon wanted their book reviews under 100 words. With all
the data they gather it's possible Amazon examined this metric. In
_"Amazonia"_ a book by *James Marcus" the first question Bezos asked Marcus
was, "what's your GPA?" then "how quickly can you do a (mini-review) book
review". Which happened to be on or under 100 words ~
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/articles/A22101-2004Jul...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/articles/A22101-2004Jul1.html)

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bouncingsoul
I would have more respect for usability groups trying to quantify everything
if they actually did a rigorous job. The habits of 25 similar people's
_monitored_ † browsing are interesting, but don't tell me they represents the
entire internet using world.

What's with seeking averages for everything? When you have completely
different situations the average is _not_ useful information:

When I go to a book store I pick up a lot of books, skim them, and put them
back because they are boring or not what I wanted. Eventually I will find an
interesting one, find a hidden courtesy chair, and read 50 pages. You could
study this information and say on average I read 3 pages of all books. That's
correct, but it's wrong and misleading.

It's not really worth critiquing the rest of the study since it's just not
rigorous enough from the outset, but a couple more points:

1\. He threw out visits lasting longer than ten minutes. Obviously that's
going to affect his conclusion.

2\. They have no idea what percentage of the text on a page was actual
content. I'd guess 25% of the words on any newspaper site page are not the
actual article. He should correct for this.

3\. He tacks it on the end, but it seriously challenges the usefulness of this
entire study: the content matters. People will read what appears interesting
to them and ignore what doesn't.

† Surely knowing their behavior is being monitored alters their behavior. If
these are work computers then they're probably wary of spending too much time
on the internet if it isn't directly related to their work. Maybe they
bookmarked articles to read at home. Or maybe they altered their browsing
because they're worried about being judged.

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aneesh
Ironic that an article on how little users read is so long!

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brlewis
Quote: _I was able to fit very nice formulas to describe users' reading
behavior for pages containing between 30 and 1,250 words. For longer pages,
reading became quite erratic. Pages with a huge word count are probably not
"real" pages anyway_

Steve Yegge, are you reading this? :-)

~~~
jrockway
The case of Steve Yegge is different. He's not trying to sell you anything;
he's just talking. If you want to listen, you'll probably learn something, so
it's in your best interest to read. If you're not interested in learning
anything, it's no skin off of Yegge's ass, so why should he care?

In other words, nice joke, but it doesn't apply here.

~~~
brlewis
Yes, it's all joke. I find it very funny that Steve's writings would be
discarded from the data as "probably not real pages" and I imagine Steve would
too.

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gaika
Good observation, wrong conclusion.

Too many words never stopped people from reading a book. Same thing applies to
a web page: you quickly scan a page, but read it if it's worth it.

~~~
webwright
I don't think that's the right conclusion either. I think user mind-set is
huge, here. Are they in shopping mode? Learning mode? Surfing mode?

I'd say 90% of the time that I scan, I'm looking for the bit of content that I
care about-- NOT trying to decide whether the article is worth reading.

~~~
Goronmon
Couldn't that just be further distilled down to users scanning material until
they decide it's worth taking the time to read more thoroughly? Even if I'm in
surfing mode, I'll stop to read an article if it's something that piques my
interest.

I mean, isn't that the whole idea behind people getting lost in the depths of
Wikipedia? You may have only brought it up in the browser to fact check
something quickly, but all of a sudden you find yourself reading about
completely unrelated materials 20 minutes later.

~~~
bodom
Breaking things up with headings, lists, and bold stuff helps people browse.
I'm sure that helps longer articles. The post may have mentioned it, but I
didn't read it all.

