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The Eyes Have It

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Findings from the Poynter EyeTrack07 research into how people read online and in print discovered that a much larger percentage of story text was read online than in print publications. Ian Delaney reports.

Findings from the Poynter EyeTrack07 research into how people read online and in print discovered that a much larger percentage of story text was read online than in print publications. Ian Delaney reports.

On average, online readers read 77 per cent of what they chose to read in the study, which involves volunteers wearing special glasses that can track what they are reading and looking at both on screen and in printed sources. This figure is much higher than the proportion of text read by readers of tabloid or broadsheet newspapers, who read 57 per cent and 62 per cent of the stories they selected respectively.

Of online readers, nearly two thirds read all the text in items they chose to read.

The study divided readers into two different styles:

• Methodical readers start at the top and finish at the bottom without too much scanning. Online, they use navigation bars and drop-down menus to locate stories.
• Scanning readers jump around pages, headlines and pictures. They read parts of a story and then jump to other elements such as pictures or boxouts.

Around 75 per cent of print readers tend to be methodical in their approach to reading, while this number drops to around 50 per cent online. However, when it comes to the amount of text read online, there was little difference between the two styles of reader, unlike in print, where methodical readers read more text than scanners.

Non-traditional formats, which included diagrams, lists and boxouts, proved more easy to digest than a traditional narrative story. Comparing reactions to six different versions of a story about the spread of bird flu, which contained the same facts in different formats, it was the non-traditional layouts with more boxes, subsections and sidebars than yielded the highest amount of information retention, both in print and online.

In online publications, navigation bars and story lists draw most attention, forming the online equivalent - when it comes to attention - of large headlines and pictures in print publications.

For more information, there is a video and a PDF file on the Poynter site documenting the findings. The full study is expected to be released in the summer.