How Users Read - Page 3
September 10, 2001
This is one of the most fascinating areas of usability, made
popular through
Nielsen and
the Poynter study. People don't read Web pages the same way
they read novels. It's a lot closer to the way they read manuals
— they scan to find what they're searching for and ignore the
rest.
This has big implications for the way text should be laid out on
a page. It shouldn't look like a novel, it should be broken up
with lots of subtitles and highlights to make scanning easier.
Your visitors want to scan — so help them by making your
pages scannable. This means keeping sentences and paragraphs
short and using meaningful headings rather than entertaining
ones.
Here's another curious side of Web page reading habits. Most
users have learned to ignore adverts. The moral here is don't
allow anything important (such as navigation elements) to look
like an advert.
Additional Resources on How Users Read
All-Encompassing Tables
Putting your entire page inside a table so you can easily arrange
the layout is very common practice, but has a usability penalty.
Browsers will not render a table on screen until they've reached
the </table> tag and know there are no more cells to be
included. So an all-encompassing table forces your visitors to
wait. That's bad usability.
One way to reduce the problem is to split the page vertically
into two or more partially-encompassing tables. It's common to
have one at the top that includes navigation elements and company
identifiers, then a separate table for the page content below.
This gives the visitor something to look at while the lower table
loads. For a long page you can also split the page somewhere
below the fold (bottom of the screen) at a convenient subtitle.
This technique can take a couple of seconds off the time your
visitor waits for their first full screen. On very long pages
it's almost essential to split the table.
Frames
Once they were all the rage, but now you'll rarely find them on
popular sites. Their demise is mainly down to the problems of
search engine access, external linking and bookmarking. Since
they have definite downsides, you need to find a very positive
reason if you're going to use them. Static and consistent
navigation isn't sufficient reason. Most usability experts are
against frames.
Additional Resources on the Use of Frames
Vertical Scrolling
Users don't like to scroll, but there's no real consensus on how
much they dislike it. For a while, European designers and US
designers went their separate ways on this issue, with the
Europeans producing long pages and Americans trying to fit
everything in one screen if they possibly could.
Nowadays both sides of the Atlantic appear to see scrolling as
only a minor usability issue. Huge pages are a bad idea because
they're awkward to use, but the equivalent of around three to
five screen heights is usually acceptable (a screen height
meaning roughly 600 pixels on an 800 wide page). You'll find many
popular sites have to be scrolled — even their home pages.
Flash Animation
Flash on the front page? Don't even think about it. Usability
experts from around the world will be e-mailing each other to have
a giggle at your site. If your users want to see a film, they can
turn on the TV. When they visit your Web site they want speedy
access to the core, to the great information that's in there.
They don't appreciate you putting the barrier of a big Flash
animation in their way.
The same applies to splash pages and other wizard tricks and
technological treats you want to impress your visitors with. If
you really want to impress them, make your site easy to use.
Additional Resources on the Use of Flash
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