people don’t read on the web
Research from Jakob Nielsen about reading behavior of web user.
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
I knew this all along, from usability, eye tracking and my own behavior, but seeing the number is very eye-opening.
An idea for a method to test out the scannability of the content on your page is to ask a person who’s not familiar with your site to read what he sees on the page out loud as fast as he can within 5 seconds. Most web users only stay for 2-3 seconds, but we need to add the extra 2 seconds to accommodate the time needed to do the reading.
Link to article:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html
