Apr 13, 2007
Well, in the case of news, you’d be wrong. It turns out that a recent eyetracking study discovered that people reading news stories online actually finish news stories more often than people reading news stories in print. The study, by the Poynter Institute, was released at American Society of Newspaper Editors conference a couple of weeks ago. Poynter’s basic story]http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=120458]story[/url] includes links to video, a PowerPoint of the conference presentation, and text. Poynter studied 600 newspaper readers from 6 different papers who read online, broadsheet, and tabloid versions of the papers, and used eyetracking software to follow what they read. Readers spent 15 minutes during each reading session over 30 days.
There was also some nice coverage in Editor and Publisher
One of the key discoveries of the study is that when readers chose to read something online, they read an average of 77% of the story, as opposed to 62% of the story if it appeared in a broadsheet and 57% in a tabloid.
Editor and Publisher says,
In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.
The research also found that 75% of print readers are methodical in their reading, which means they start reading a page at a particular story and work their way through each story. Just 25% of print readers are scanners, who scan the entire page first, then choose a story to read.
Online, however, about half of readers are methodical, while the other half scan, the report found. The survey also revealed that large headlines and fewer, large photos attracted more eyes than smaller images in print. But online, readers were drawn more to navigation bars and teasers.
Poynter tracked comprehension by doing interviews of their subjects. One of the fascinating aspects of what they learned is that alternative story forms-Q&As, timelines, short sidebars, and listsincrease reader comprehension and retention of story contents both in print and online: “Our prototype test showed that more questions were answered correctly about a story presented in an alternative manner in print and online-with no traditional narrative.”
In print, bigger heads and photos attracted readers, but online readers looked for navigation bars and teasers.
Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?