Poynter just launched the results of their recent study EyeTrack07 about the nature and comparison of reading a newspaper in print versus online. Some of the main findings appear surprising at first:
A larger percentage of story text was read online (77%) than in print (62%).
63% of online readers read their selected stories to completion compared with 40% in print.
Alternative story forms – like Q&A’s, timelines, short sidebars and lists – help readers understand.
When you consider these findings in the context of the general explosion and prevalence of the weblog in all its forms, and the sharp increase in ‘community’ related content in the last couple of years, perhaps they are not so surprising after all.
I recently attended the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference in London and almost every speaker referred to their audience not as readers, but predictably as users, and more interestingly as members. Bearing this in mind, when I read about the EyeTrack07 study, it makes sense that readers on screen want to interact with the text and the stories they are reading, and how this interactivity provides a spur on to further or deeper reading. In terms of the typographic design and layout of text on screen, it is clear that designers need to engage in stronger critical analysis of textual matter, in conjunction with editors and writers, in order to determine what interactive strategies can be best employed to create both an engaging and easy to use reading experience. Perhaps these concerns are just as important for designers of screen texts as tradition formal design decisions relating to typographic expression and hierarchy.
The other interesting aspect of this study is in the empirical methods it employs. Here is the beginning of some hard data providing key information about the nature of how we read on screen, which is a relatively new experience when compared to centuries of a culture of print reading. Although this is still a relatively new field of research, Poynter and other key researchers such as Mary Dyson and Kevin Larson are making significant contributions which will help designers and content creators working with on screen textual material in the same way that ground breaking research from the likes of Miles Tinker and Herbert Spencer influenced design for print.
