This is illustrative of the more agitated, interactive state of mind people usually have when using the Internet (compared, for example, to their more passive consumption of books and Television).
If you watch someone surfing the Internet, they will typically lean forward towards the screen. Because of this, many of the best practices in writing for the web involve minimising the amount of content a user has to read. Both of these factors mean that reading from a screen can easily cause headaches and eyestrain. In addition, screens shine light into users’ eyes. The resolution of a screen display is not as good as the printed page, so users’ eyes need to work harder in order to read it. There are two main reasons that users scan: In order to achieve good results when writing for the web, it helps to understand why people behave this way. Instead, we must realise that good practice in writing for the web is to write web content that supports ‘scanning’.
This means that we need to be able to write web content that does not demand to be read. The predominance of users’ scanning behaviour means that when we write for the web, we need to make sure that we write pages that can be scanned as efficiently and effectively as possible. This behaviour is typically known as ‘scanning’. Heart-breaking as it might be for people who write for the web, research has repeatedly shown that users typically glance at a page to quickly ‘get the gist’ of it and then (if you are lucky) concentrate their attention on a specific area that’s relevant to their goals. The most important thing to realise when writing for the web is that most people don’t read web pages, they scan them. Signposts must be visually noticeable, make sense out of context and communicate their message as clearly and directly as possible. Web content should be written with signposts that clearly communicate what issue is being covered.
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