How People Read Online: New and Old Findings | Hacker News Reader

How People Read Online: New and Old Findings

nngroup.com

83 pointsadamfard19 comments

"Lawn-mower pattern" is their new phrase for when people skim content left-to-right, then drop down to the next line and go right-to-left, until they get back to the beginning.

I LOVE this. Why? Because it so perfectly replicates a metaphor from ancient Greece. Some early manuscripts were written the same way. Write the first line left-to-right, then the next line is right-to-left, then flip again.

They called this "Ox-turn" writing (boustrophedonic), because it's like the pattern you make when plowing a field. We don't use oxen much any more, but we do use lawnmowers. So the same phrase comes back!

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-bou1.htm

Oxen plowing fields is probably also why the canonical acre is a rectangular, not square, measure. (1 furlong x 1 chain)

  Several participants in our study began reading articles
  nearly linearly and completely until they hit a pull 
  quote or inline ad. After reaching one of those elements,
  the participants abandoned their reading and fell into
  light scanning.

I never noticed but I do that every time.

I dislike pull quotes in magazines for this reason, but I understand their purpose. Online, distracting the reader and messing up the reading-order seems to be the only thing they do.

If you're interested in visual tracking and reading, you might like the color gradient-based reading tool called BeeLine Reader.[1] It seeks to remediate the same problems as boustrophedon, but does so with color instead of reversed writing.

A study done by CNET and covered in The Atlantic showed that people reading with this color-based technique ended up reading significantly more text than people reading plain black text.[2]

note: I am the founder, and we got our start via a surprisingly successful Show HN post!

1: http://www.beelinereader.com

2: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-bett...

What a neat idea, almost surprised I haven't seen something like it before.

I get that for print it's historically been best to just stick with black text on a white background, but for computer text I feel like this kind of technology should've been able to exist in the 90s.

> I feel like this kind of technology should've been able to exist in the 90s.

Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, has talked about the possibility that there have been any notable innovations that ‘came too late’.

In particular, he talks about the wheeled suitcase, which at first glance seems to have come decades too late. But he ultimately concludes that the weight that would have been added by metal wheels and enclosures were unnecessary at previous times, when airports were much smaller. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any other candidates for technologies that came too late.

But I think that this the BeeLine technology could fit the bill.

And it did, just not for newspaper reading (which was arguably still nascent in the 90's). Programmers have been using syntax-based coloring since approximately when there were color terminals. (Fun fact: you can setup colored man pages, which greatly improves readability imo.) That the web has been a step backwards for client side design is lamentable, if expected. User-side CSS was supposed to set us free. But I don't recall the last time I did that for a site, unless you use reader-mode.

Super interesting.

But after visiting the Beeline Reader website, I'm puzzled by:

* There's no Wordpress plugin.

* There is javascript, but you have to contact them about it.

* Their pricing/FAQ section isn't in Beeline.

All good comments! We’ve thought about a wordpress plugin but would have to set up some sort of API-based system for that due to the way WP plugins have to work.

The FAQ section has short answers, which is why we don’t use BeeLine natively there.

I think this topic needs some explanation for older people that do not believe people that use the web extensively actually read.

Because people scan a page rather than read every word in the order the author thought best does not devalue what is going on.

Say you were interested in WW2 history you could read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor to then become an expert on that aspect of the war. Or you could research the topic online going across many online sources to answer your own questions. This latter approach where no book is read from cover to cover has a lot of merit. However, some older people might call this not reading. To them this would be grazing any old nonsense written online.

We need to challenge these entrenched attitudes. It is totally okay to study online flitting about between content and sources. Reading online is different to reading books and we should not be concerned with how people do this in order to make condescending remarks.

I'm curious, what "older people" do you consider that believe that?

Because the "older people" I know that use the web (in their 60's), they actually commit to read the few articles/blogs/news they choose to read.

They are far from heavy users, their web browsing is probably limited to 1-2hours max.

Reading this made me feel like the odd one out or something. I'll read an article start to finish, read tables by row and generally do things in a left to right pattern. I ignore sidebars, headers and footers, especially ones that don't scroll and generally read content in a linear order and pick one topic at a time until I finish it.

Boustrophedonic mode on Kindle please!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#/media/File:Bous...

wow who designed that page such that closing the fullscreen image goes to the prior page. There is no way to get to the wiki article from that image lol

Pretty terrible! But you can just delete the "/media..." path in the url and refresh

The "X" button correctly returns to the wiki page if it was opened in a new tab / window so there's no prior page to return to.

the image for 'pinball pattern' made me briefly nauseous

this is every annoying recirc where I get dragged down the sidebar and then put a piece of paper in front of the monitor to control myself

daily mail-ization, parallel columns

total loss off control

Summary:

“Design content that doesn’t waste people’s time and effort which directs people to only the information they want.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com