How We Really Use the Web

The marketers build Web sites to promote their products. They want, above all things, to create environments interesting for the visitors to stay and make purchases. This building faces several design decisions like: How much information to put? How to distribute the content? What colors to use?

The specialists researching how people use the Web often discuss the difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them. When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click.

What they actually do most of the time (if we're lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they're looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don't even look at. They see a page like a "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour."
 

 
We have to learn to live with this fact about real-world Web use:

Fact of life: People don't read pages. People scan them.

One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.

The exception, of course, is pages that contain documents like news stories, reports, or product descriptions. But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we’re likely to print it out because it’s easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen.

Why Do We Scan?

We’re usually in a hurry. Much of our Web use is motivated by the desire to save time. We just don’t have the time to read any more than necessary.

We know we don’t need to read everything. On most pages, we’re really only interested in a fraction of what’s on the page. We’re just looking for the bits that match our interests or the task at hand, and the rest of it is irrelevant. Scanning is how we find the relevant bits.

We’re good at it. We’ve been scanning newspapers, magazines, and books all our lives to find the parts we’re interested in, and we know that it works.

What we see when we look at a Web page depends on what we have in mind, but it’s usually just a fraction of what’s on the page.

So, What's a Marketer to Do?

The answer is simple: If your audience is going to act like you're designing billboards, then design great billboards.

If you want to learn how to build billboards, more info about web usability, and practical advice in designing web sites the friendly way, get this book: "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug."