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People Don’t Read Online—They Scan. This Is How to Write for Them

9 eye-scanning patterns, 10 ways to adapt the text for max readability.

Rita Kind-Envy
UX Planet

Amish Letter Writer by Horace Pippin

We write texts for different purposes, but there’s one thing we all have in common—we write online.

On the web, things work a little bit awkwardly. You may have already learned from companies’ writing style guides or articles here on Medium that the following factors help retain readers’ attention:

  • Keeping paragraphs short
  • Combining shorter and longer sentences
  • Using bullet points
  • Adding relevant illustrations

The problem is, applying writing ‘lifehacks’ blindly is not the way to go.

Doctors learn the structure of the human body before treating it. Writers must learn how human eyes work to get people to devour the content. Let’s look at how people read nowadays to learn how to write for them.

The scientific base of this article

The Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most prominent user experience research companies, has something to say about how people read online. This article is based on their eye-tracking experiment data.

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Responses (400)

What are your thoughts?

Very helpful tips here, Rita.

In addition to your tips: Don't repeat words too much, instead, use synonyms of words you may repeat often. Explain terms that your readers may not know.

Great article, shared with our UX writing team! 2 more tips? Keep sentences and paragraphs short. And remember that white space is your friend.

Bookmarking this Rita! Amazing research and useful info! Thasnks so much for writing!