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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

>A study designed and carried out at Stanford University showed an average reading speed increase of over 10 percent for first time users of BeeLine Reader. Many seasoned users experience speed increases of 25 to 30 percent!

So why isn't the study linked?

Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.

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I took their test and came out 2% faster (likely statistical noise more than actual improvement). Regardless, I attribute the improvement to the obscure content in the non beeline reading passage.

I'm curious what others experienced?

I had a similar thought when I read the texts. The first (b&w) text was just harder to comprehend due to esoteric words, lack of thought direction, and several personas. I couldn't understand what author was trying to say. The second (colored) text was about a female teacher and had a common vocabulary and a straight-forward theme with one character.

According to them I read 11% faster. Although I guessed on 2 out 3 questions, compared to knowing all 3 from b&w text.

Thus, I call BS on their testing experience. These two texts are way too different. And picking an easier one for beeline text does a disservice to this hopefully legit fast reading method.

Actually, the test randomizes which passage you receive in which color. So if you got the "harder" one in Beeline, you might have the opposite experience. (I've tried it a couple times to see how it works...)

I did the test and came out 37% ahead. I was surprised.

That said, I often find myself fiddling with the cursor to mark my place when I'm reading something long, so the idea that extra indicators of place might help doesn't surprise me.

I feel better line spacing might also help - their test seemed to have the lines pretty tight together, although I'm not surprised a test would be designed to best showcase their software.

The first time it showed me 15% improvement and I got suspicious because I thought I had read the black text at about the same time.

Then I took it again with a different subject but I timed it.

It took me ~81 sec to read the colored, ~92 to read the black. It said I read 23% faster with BeeLine. What gives?

The passages do not have the same number of words, so just looking at the number of seconds isn't sufficient. You have to use the word counts for each in order to get the words/min.

With a sample of that size there is no way 2% is significant. You're talking about 1 or 2 seconds right? Mine was 50% or more. Maybe I'm extremely distractable.

I had basically the exact same experience. I'm a bit dubious about whether this actually helps on a computer, since I can just use my mouse cursor to track lines.

Try it on your phone—many people find it to be most useful there.

The bright color scheme was selected so that it's really obvious to first-time website visitors what's going on. When we read with the bookmarklets, we don't use the bright color scheme—usually it's greyscale or blue/purple.

It looks like BeeLine didn't improve your reading speed this time through.

i found the colors to be rather distracting and not helpful. the results of two tests taken seem to agree with that.

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