When users receive news information they supposedly care about, their concentration doesn’t much improve. In 2006, Nielsen performed its own eyetracking study of user news consumption, this time examining how users take in email newsletters and RSS news feeds (“Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion”). People receive newsletters and feeds because they have asked for them, subscribing to newsletters and personalizing the feeds so that their inbox fills with content matched to their professional and leisure interests. But their interests barely affected their reading habits. When email newsletters arrive, Nielsen discovered, users allot only 51 seconds to them. “ ‘Reading’ is not even the right word,” he writes, “since participants
fully read only 19% of newsletters
.” Recipients ignored the introductory material (67 percent of them “had zero fixations within newsletter introductions”), glanced at the main content, then moved on to something else. News feeds are popular with young adults, personalizing portals and filtering out uninteresting news. But “Our eyetracking of users reading news feeds,” Nielsen reports, “showed that people
scan headlines
and blurbs in feeds even more ruthlessly than they scan newsletters.” They typically read only the first two words of headlines, and if nothing in the list sparks their attention in a half-second’s time, they pass on.
These inquiries into Web reading don’t try to distinguish individuals by group markers, but in a couple of cases Nielsen did in fact single out participants by age and literacy. A 2005 alert reported findings for lower-literacy users, which Nielsen estimates constitute fully 30 percent of all Web users. In tests for this group, the reading pattern both slowed down and sped up. On one hand, their smaller vocabularies forced them into linear processing. “They must
read word for word
,” Nielsen writes, “and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.” They don’t scan in the way middle- and high-literacy users do, and so they don’t reach enough information to make nuanced choices. Furthermore, when the page gets too complicated, they don’t hop through it—they skip it entirely. Hence the flip side of their usage, the acceleration. In both cases, comprehension suffers.
A few months before the lower-literacy alert, Nielsen reported on the other group tested—teenagers. Testers monitored 38 13- to 17-year -olds as they visited 23 Web sites, performed assigned tasks, and voiced their immediate responses, the findings published in the Alert “Usability of Websites for Teenagers.” Nielsen remarks upon the standard conceptions of young users, that they live “wired lifestyles,” wield technology better than their elders, and are “technowizards who surf the Web with abandon.” In this case, however, “our study refuted these stereotypes.” Overall, teens displayed reading skills, research procedures, and patience levels insufficient to navigate the Web effectively. They harbor the same traits of other Web surfers, only more so. Their success rate for completing ordinary tasks online reached only 55 percent, significantly short of the 66 percent success rate that adult users achieve. Teenage users scan skippingly like older users, though a bit faster, and they likewise struggle to stay on point as they travel from page to page. They favor cool graphics and clean design, and businesses hoping to draw teen traffic to their Web site better find ways to entertain them. “Being boring is the kiss of death in terms of keeping teens on your site,” Nielsen says. “That’s one stereotype our study confirmed: teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated.” A site that demands close attention to words sends them packing, for the simple fact is: “
Teenagers don’t like to read a lot on the Web
. They get enough of that at school.”
Interestingly, Nielsen paused in the teen alert to criticize common overestimations of teen agility online. First of all, he noted, too many projects and commentaries rely on self-reported behavior instead of close observation of actual behavior by testers and by eyetracking technology. Second, Web experts come from the “high end of the brainpower/techno-enthusiasm curve,” and the teens they encounter do, too. Surrounded by youths skilled in technology, they take them as the norm, misjudging the vast majority of young users. “Rarely do people in the top 5 percent spend any significant time with the 80 percent of the population who constitute the mainstream audience,” Nielsen chided. Furthermore, Web experts tend to remember the “super-users in the bunch,” the ones who performed unusual feats, not the rest who did what everyone else does. Recall James Gee’s focus on “kids who have redesigned the family computer, designed new maps and even made mods, designed Web sites, written guides, and contracted relationships with people across the world,” as if such standouts filled every high school. Only the insulation of researchers in an advanced Web world leads them to judge such youths typical, or to believe that with more challenging screen time many, many more teens can rise to their level. Nielsen’s study suggests a different set of talents to improve the other 80 percent: not more computer literacy and screen time, but more basic literacy and more patience, things better attained elsewhere.
NIELSEN’S
RESEARCH
is an impartial and skeptical commentary on the sanguine visions of digital learning and screen-based education that we’ve heard, and it recasts the entire intellectual meaning of Web technologies. Although Nielsen’s experiments are limited, nonetheless they record vital screen habits that affect screen experience of all verbal kinds. Web reading and Web learning on average, Nielsen demonstrates, are far less creative, complex, literate, and inquisitive than techno-enthusiasts claim. People seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. They judge what they see not on objective traits of the content delivered, the quality of language and image, but on subjective traits of familiarity and ease. The fluent passage from one site to the next often counts more than the unique features of one site and another, and the more a site seems self-contained, as with PDF files, the less users approve it. Indeed, as Nielsen stated in the 2003 alert “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption,” the more Web pages look like book pages, the less people read them. A big, linear text lacking ordinary navigation features, a PDF strikes users as a “content blob,” and anybody motivated to read it usually prints it to paper first. In general, the content encountered and habits practiced online foster one kind of literacy, the kind that accelerates communication, homogenizes diction and style, and answers set questions with information bits. It does not favor the acquisition of knowledge, distinctive speech and prose, or the capacity to reason in long sequential units. It does not cultivate the capacity to comprehend dense texts such as a legal contract or a logical proof or an Elizabethan sonnet. In fact, hard texts irritate young people, for they’ve spent years clicking away from big blocks of prose and thick arguments, and losing the freedom to do so (say, in a classroom) doesn’t stir them to think harder and read more closely. Forming reading and thought patterns through screens prepares individuals for only part of the communications demands of the twenty-first century, the information-retrieval and consumer-behavior parts. The abilities to concentrate upon a single, recondite text, to manage ambiguities and ironies, to track an inductive proof . . . screen reading hampers them.
Digital Age devotees contend, of course, that Web 2.0 can inspire both. Yes, young users will continue the hasty browsing and juvenile pleasures, they affirm, but with better games and sites, and more intelligent interactivity, users will upgrade their cognition and open their perception. As technology improves and screens grow more portable and reader-friendly, people will play more, read more, and learn more. Minds will soar upward, they predict, and at the core of their vision lies an assumption about the malleability of human nature, a dream of perfectibility with a long utopian tradition behind it.
Nielsen regards the prospect differently, not from the viewpoint of educators tied to a scheme of human progress and industry figures who stand to profit from digital learning, but from that of an independent researcher interested in what works. Given the routine behavior of ordinary users, what must businesses do to survive in online environments? he asks, and the entire thrust of Nielsen Norman’s consultation assumes a reverse process for the Web/user future. Instead of young minds and sensibilities adapting to the Web’s smarter elements, the people and businesses purveying Web content need to adapt to the interests and impatience of youths. Human nature is more resistant to change than the enthusiasts think, and the Web offers too many choices for experts and mental engineers to steer human behavior in one direction. Inertia and familiarity rule a user’s actions, not long-term learning goals, and the tendency holds most especially with adolescents. If presented with a series of sites with more and less challenging content, users do what nature inclines them to do: patronize the least taxing and most customary zones. Web designers and Web-prone educators who hold out for higher-order thinking tasks and who try to control user usage will find their products neglected and forgotten.
This is the reality Nielsen highlights. The Web is a consumer habitat, not an educational one. Digital-learning advocates might restrict one sphere of usage in a classroom or through homework, and parents might invest in educational games for their children, but whatever benefits the assignments and programs provide will dissipate in the many more hours students spend online alone. Nobody can overcome the imbalance, not conscientious parents and not multimillion-dollar foundations, and the more that young Americans read, write, view, listen, shop, gossip, play, role-play, design, and emote online, the more the educational aims will vanish. The habits young people form after school, on weekends, and over the summer are pleasing—fast scanning, page hopping, sloppy writing, associative thinking, no unfamiliar content—and while they undermine the values and demands of the classroom and the workplace (scrupulous reading, good grammar, analytic thinking), these habits won’t go away.
With observed online consumer habits ever in hand, Nielsen drafts a series of recommendations for site design that anticipate the future of screen experience. Survival in the hypercompetitive climate of the Web depends on securing and holding a limited resource, the attention of meandering users. To make their sites rank high in search queries, to make sites a regular stop in a user’s daily travels, to lengthen that pause, Nielsen advises, Web designers must alter the language and format of their pages. Here are some specifics:
• Because users visit one page
through
other pages, and rely on that one page to lead them profitably to other pages as well, the one page should downplay its distinctiveness. To ease inter-site movement, Nielsen writes, “users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know” (“End of Web Design”). A site whose language reflects that of other sites facilitates a user’s flow and will yield higher traffic. A site whose language attains a style and vocabulary superior to others doesn’t inspire more and longer visits. It interrupts the flow and sends users elsewhere.
• To attract lower-literacy users, sites should key their language to specific literacy levels, a sixth-grade reading level on the home page, Nielsen counsels, and an eighth-grade level for other pages. If diction and syntax rise above middle-school competence, sites automatically exclude visitors/customers/members solely on grounds of readability. A fair portion of visitors will come and never return, a risk businesses can’t run in such a competitive market.
• To draw a steady stream of new visitors, sites must optimize their “searchability.” “Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page,” Nielsen observes, “you might as well not exist.” Because users usually type common words into the search box, a site whose keywords are technical terms, marketese, or any kind of exotic or sophisticated diction drops down the results list. Novel vocabulary restricts site visits, and so, Nielsen urges in the title of a 2006 alert, “Use Old Words when Writing for Findability.”
• To mirror the fast scanning style of Web reading, sites should contain writing that is eminently scannable. Each paragraph should contain only one idea, Nielsen says, and each should comprise half the word count of conventional writing. Keywords should be highlighted through typeface and color variations so that they serve as convenient markers for the scurrying reader. Language should sound objective and evidence-based so that users don’t suffer the added cognitive burden of distinguishing fact from bias and exaggeration. Finally, the more designers can break the text up into units through subheadings, bullets, and boxes, the more easily users can identify its relevance.
• In a corollary to “scannability,” text and image should have high visibility for a variety of tools. In particular, Web pages must charm users through the least reader-friendly screens, as do cell phones and other mobile devices. That calls for even shorter sentences, more highlighted and simple keywords, and more schematic aids such as subheads and bullet lists.
These recommendations follow directly from the observed behavior of ordinary people in action online. Their screen reading, surfing, and searching habits dictate the terms of successful sites, and they mark an obdurate resistance to certain lower-order and higher-order thinking skills, most important, the capacity to read carefully and to cogitate analytically. When a site contains edifying material that doesn’t echo their active interests, users don’t stick around, settle in, and undergo an on-screen lesson. They return to the search results to find a site that does meet their needs, immediately, without burdening themselves with learning anything else. When a page slows them down, as PDF files tend to do, users don’t slow down for long. They click out. When they encounter big words on a page, they don’t reach for a dictionary. They hurdle them, and if too many big words show up, they leave the scene entirely. When they need information, users seek out the simplest, straightest rendition, not a nuanced, contextualized, qualified version. The mind online drifts toward simplicity, familiarity, and visibility. It wants the greatest amount of content for the least amount of work.