Category: communication

Does your website’s readability deserve an F?

If you’re like most website readers, you focus your attention (what little you have) on the opening paragraph of text. So said Jakob Nielson more than five years ago.

You can just skip this paragraph and move on to the next one. If Nielson is right, you probably will anyway.

And then, according to Nielson, your eyes will track back to this paragraph. The eye tends to skim website text in an F pattern. “F for fast,” Nielson says. “That’s how users read your precious content.”

Heat maps show eye-tracking F patterns from Jakob Nielsens 2006 study. (Click image for link to Nielsons original article.)
Heat maps show eye-tracking 'F' patterns from Jakob Nielsen's 2006 study. (Click image for link to Nielson's original article.)

So why am I blogging today, in 2011, about usability research that is more than half a decade old? Because, thanks to this article in The Next Web, I was reminded of this research a couple of days ago. It never hurts for a verbose blogger to be reminded that readers don’t always hang on our every word.

More important, that TNW article made wonder if Nielsen’s findings still hold true in the content-streamed, microblogging world of Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

By now you’re probably done with this article. But hang on for just a minute and think about these questions:

Do our eyes still track that F shape in our new social media-saturated world? What about on mobile devices? What about tablets? Has technology changed the way our eyes traverse a screen?

Back in 2006, maybe your website did deserve an “F” (pattern). Does that still hold true today? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

License to remix

Recently, Michael Fienen wrote a lengthy but thoughtful and thought-provoking post over on .eduGuru about copyright and reuse issues (Copyright, Content, and Consumption).

Fienen’s focus was on whether the use of so-called “read later” tools like Evernote could be construed as theft of creative work or intellectual property. It’s an important subject and one that a Lawrence Lessig fanboy like me can appreciate. You should read Fienen’s post, because the topic could impact the way you read, share and save information online. And don’t gloss over the comments, because there’s more great info shared there.

But what caught my attention in a more practical sense was a point Fienen made near the end of his post. He asked readers to “please take the time to put a Creative Commons license on things you create … [t]o protect yourself and make it clear to others what you will permit.”

I’ve been blogging here for more than 5 years, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had never bothered to license this blog and its content under Creative Commons.

That situation has been corrected. At the bottom of this blog’s sidebar is now a statement of license. It looks sort of like this:

Creative Commons License
Higher Ed Marketing by Andrew Careaga is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you don’t have a Creative Commons license on your blog or other intellectual or creative work, maybe it’s time you did.