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How Users Read on the Web

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Users don't read Web pages, they scan. Highlighting and concise writing improved measured usability 47-58%. Marketese imposed a cognitive burden on users and was disliked.

3 How Users Read on the Web Jakob Nielsen Jakob Nielsen September 30, 1997 1997-09-30 Share Email article Share on LinkedIn Share on Twitter Summary: They don't. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.) As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable te

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