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How Little Do Users Read? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
via www.useit.com by (author unknown) on May 06, 2008
Shared by Ionut
The conclusion is that people don't actually read, they just scan the text.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 � they're more likely to be either academic papers or "terms & conditions" pages, which people don't give the time of day. (In research for the book Prioritizing Web Usability, we found that people read only about 10% of the text that they supposedly "agreed" to.)
The following chart shows the average time users spend on pages with different word counts:
Obviously, users tend to spend more time on pages with more information. However, the best-fit formula tells us that they spend only 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words.
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