A business owner spends a weekend writing the About page for her new website. It tells the story properly: how she started, why she cares, what makes her approach different. She rewrites the opening five times. She’s proud of it, and rightly so.
A few months later, she looks at her website analytics. Visitors spend an average of eleven seconds on the page. Most of them never scroll past the first photograph.
It’s tempting to take this personally, or to conclude that people don’t care. Neither is quite right. People care plenty, but they aren’t reading in the way the writer imagined. On screens especially, people behave less like readers and more like hunters, scanning for the thing they came for and moving on the moment they find it, or decide it isn’t there.
That’s not a flaw in your customers. It’s one of the most consistent findings about how humans take in information, and once you understand it, you can design for it.
One Like insight: Write for the reader you have, not the reader you wish you had.
How people really read online
In 1997, the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen published a short column with a memorable headline: “How Users Read on the Web.” His answer, in the first line, was simply: “They don’t.” In a study he ran with John Morkes, 79 percent of test users always scanned any new page they came across, picking out individual words and sentences. Only 16 percent read word by word.
The more useful part of the research came next. Nielsen and Morkes built five versions of the same website, containing the same basic information about tourist attractions in Nebraska, and asked people to complete tasks with each one. Compared with the original promotional version, a version with about half the words scored 58% higher on their measure of usability. A version with the same words laid out for scanning, using a simple list, scored 47% higher. And a version that combined concise, scannable and neutral writing scored 124% higher.
The research is old, and websites have changed enormously since. But the basic behaviour it describes has proved remarkably durable. Screens have got smaller, attention has become more contested, and the pressure to find things quickly has only grown. If anything, the case for writing for scanners is stronger today than it was then.
Highlight: Most people don’t read your page. They search it for the one thing they came for.
Why we skim
Scanning isn’t laziness. It’s a sensible strategy for a busy person with a specific goal. Most people arrive at a business’s website, email or brochure with a question in mind: Do you do this? Where are you? How much is it? Can I book for Saturday? Every sentence that doesn’t help answer that question is something to get past.
The most surprising finding in Nielsen and Morkes’s study helps explain this. They expected people to prefer neutral language to promotional “marketese”, and they did. What they hadn’t expected was that the neutral version also performed measurably better: people completed tasks faster, made fewer errors and remembered more. Their explanation was that boastful language creates extra work. When a page opens by claiming that Nebraska is filled with internationally recognised attractions, the reader’s first instinct is to doubt it, and that small moment of scepticism slows them down and distracts them from what they came to find.
That’s worth sitting with, because so much small-business copy is written in exactly that style. “We are passionate about delivering exceptional service.” “Our award-winning team goes above and beyond.” The writer means well. The reader’s brain quietly files it under “everyone says that” and keeps hunting for a fact.
[Infographic placement] The same paragraph, two ways. Left panel, headed Written to impress: a dense paragraph such as “At Smith & Co we pride ourselves on delivering an exceptional, tailored accounting experience, and our passionate team goes above and beyond for every client…” with the useful facts buried at the end. Right panel, headed Written to be found: a short heading (“Monthly bookkeeping from R1,500”) followed by three short lines: what’s included, who it’s for, how to start. Caption: Nielsen and Morkes found that concise, scannable, neutral writing more than doubled measured usability.
Highlight: Boastful copy doesn’t just fail to persuade. It slows people down while they work out what you actually do.
Writing for scanners
Nielsen’s original column listed a handful of practical techniques that still hold up. Use headings that say what’s in the section rather than clever ones. Highlight the keywords people are scanning for. Keep to one idea per paragraph, because readers tend to skip anything that isn’t signalled by the first few words. Start with the conclusion, the way journalists do, and add detail afterwards. Use lists where you have a list. And aim for roughly half the words you’d use in conventional writing.
In practice, this means asking a different question when you write. Instead of “How do I tell our story?”, ask “What is the visitor looking for, and how quickly can they find it?” For most small businesses, the answers are predictable: what you do, where you are, what it costs, how to get in touch and why they should trust you. Those things should be easy to spot within seconds, not buried in paragraph four.
None of this means your story doesn’t matter. People who are interested will read more, and a good story can be a real reason to choose you. The trick is to let scanners find what they need first, and then invite the curious ones deeper. Think of a good newspaper: the headline and first paragraph give you the essentials, and the rest is there if you want it.
Highlight: Put the answer first. Let the story be the reward for the people who stay.
What this means for a small business
Pick the page or document your customers use most, perhaps your home page, your price list or your standard quote email. Then try a simple test. Show it to someone for ten seconds, take it away and ask them three questions: What does this business do? What does it cost, roughly? What should I do next? If they can’t answer, the important information isn’t where their eyes go.
Then edit with a scanner in mind. Move the answers people need to the top. Replace vague claims with specific facts: a price, a timeframe, a number of years, a named area you serve. Turn long paragraphs into short ones and list-like content into actual lists. Cut anything that sounds impressive but tells the reader nothing new.
A few questions can help:
- What are the three things most visitors want to know, and can they spot them in ten seconds?
- Which sentences are there to impress rather than inform?
- Could we say this in half the words?
- Do our headings tell people what’s underneath, or are they trying to be clever?
Which brings us back to the beautifully written About page with its eleven-second visits. Her story doesn’t need to disappear. It just needs to wait its turn. Put what visitors are hunting for at the top, and the people who are genuinely interested will scroll down to discover why she started. Those are the readers she wrote it for in the first place.
Sources
- Jakob Nielsen, “How Users Read on the Web”, Alertbox, 1 October 1997 (archived copy). Based on research by John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen. The original is now hosted on the Nielsen Norman Group website.
