Jakob Nielsen’s current Alertbox column looks at how much users actually read on the web:
Summary:
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.We’ve known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don’t read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding.
The only thing we’ve been missing is a mathematical formula to quantify exactly how much (or how little) people read online. Now, thanks to new data, we have this as well.
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