How Users Read the Web

2007-10-17 13:50 | 07. Human Factors

Certainly, there are many Web users who print out some information from the Web if they need it at a later date, for they do not want to rely on retrieving the information after leaving the Web site (see Nielsen 2000). “Sometimes, the remote server will be down, sometimes the webmaster has removed the page, and sometimes the users are simply not able to find the page a second time.” ( Nielsen 2000, p 94) Nonetheless, the main interest in Web sites is immediate access to online information; this is what the whole thing is all about.

So, during the last ten to fifteen years, several usability studies have been concerned with the reading performance from screens while comparing the results with the reading performance from paper. At that time, findings have seemed to confirm that silent reading from screens is about 20-30 percent slower than reading from paper.

This is still – and by far – the most widespread experimental finding from usability research (see Dillon 1994, see also Nielsen 1997, Nielsen 1997a, Morkes & Nielsen 1997, Nielsen et al. 1998, Nielsen 2000, Kana et al. 2003), even if Dillon (1994) has explained that there are actually several performance deficits besides a reduced reading speed, such as deficient accuracy, fatigue and eyestrain (see also Lackerbauer 2003).

Dillon (1994) has also drawn attention to the fact that there are not only physical sources of such performance deficits, e.g. screen resolution or a monitor’s refresh rate; there are also perceptual and cognitive sources of that difference. Yet, as one of the most crucial findings from human factor research, he concluded that the evidence on balance from all experiments so far indicates that people do read more slowly from computer screens.

Nielsen, in fact, has built a big deal of his work upon the reading speed problem. He argues that – as a result – “people don’t want to read a lot of text from computer screens”, and that this is “also a matter of feeling good” (Nielsen 1997). Nielsen has also found out that users “rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences” (Nielsen 1997a). He has further stated that this is also “because the online experience seems to foster some amount of impatience” (Nielsen 1997), referring to the problem of a certain delay when refreshing a page.

Many different studies seem to confirm these findings, as Dillon has already outlined in 1994; but there are also newer studies, such as an eye-tracking experiment from Poynter Institute in May 2000, which has proven that – on the Web – “the most common behaviour is to hunt for information and be ruthless in ignoring details” (Nielsen 2000a).

Of course, the monitor and display technology has changed rapidly over the last few years. Nowadays’ cathode ray tube monitors (CRT) work on a refresh rate that allows watching the screen almost without any background flicker; liquid crystal displays (LCD/TFT), which even work without any flicker, reach high resolution standards that do not affect human eyes the way comparable devices did a few years ago. Such tendencies have already been foreseen by Dillon (1994, p 38) who mentioned that “shifts may be occurring as technology improves and readers become experienced with the new medium”. Even Nielsen (1997) has stated:

“The screen readability problem will be solved in the future, since screens with 300 dpi resolution have been invented and have been found to have as good readability as paper. High-resolution screens are currently too expensive (high-end monitors in commercial use have about 110 dpi), but will be available in a few years and common ten years from now.”

Nonetheless, there are still some conventional monitors in use nowadays (see also Kilian 1999). Thus, Web site content must be prepared according to those characteristics of the medium that represent recent technological standards – not the state-of-the-art. Differences in the reading speed still must be taken into consideration.

But what else do we know about the human factors on the Web? More coming up in the next posting.

How Users Read the Web

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