What is it readers want, content or design?
A recent eyetracker study has shown what web designers might already know - less information and more white space on a web page results in better recall and comprehension.
Featured findings:
- Rewrite + reformat = remember
- Precise and relevant editing = successful design
- Photos edited for relevance = photos viewed
Read the study here and see images of the eyetracker ‘hotspot’ results.
If you had to decide between content or visual aesthetics, it’s quite clear that content is king. No matter how good your site looks, if the content can’t keep people, visitors won’t stay beyond the “oo, that’s pretty” phase. But too much content, and more importantly cluttering the screen with it, can lose people as well.
Basically, as LostRemote says, “Give your audience the essentials, give a clean presentation and they will remember the information. Time to clear out the clutter from your sites.”
A personal experience of this for me was a news site where I was looking for video content. I was convinced I had looked carefully for any links to their video, and finally in frustration emailed the site asking for direction. The video content link ended up being on the front page of the website, but below the fold (scrolling). Had the page been better designed I should have seen it easily. Finding information on a news portal shouldn’t be like a choose-your-own-adventure book.
From the study:
Rewrite + reformat = remember
Changing the story presentation to text with:
# bulleted items
# subheadlines
# tighter writing
increased comprehension by 12 percent, with readers of the reformatted text indicating that they were more satisfied with the experience.
“Assume people will only read the first few words of a line, so bulleted lists are always good, as is bolding or creating links from important, information-bearing words.“
Precise and relevant editing = successful design
On home pages and story level pages, eye patterns indicated that text that isn’t precise and images that aren’t information-bearing don’t get looks, amounting to wasted space.
# replace useless graphics with useful ones or with white space.
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