That’s you. You’re a scanner. I’m a scanner too. In fact, we’re all scanners. According to Jacob Neilson (commonly known as the world’s foremost expert on all things relating to Usability),

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

So if we’re not reading any more than 20% of the words what are we doing? We’re scanning. Despite this harsh reality, we still have to get our point across and communicate effectively with our website visitors.

This post will explain why we scan, what we scan, and how you can use this knowledge to ensure that your website visitors hang around long enough to understand what it is that you’re trying to say.

The most important word you will learn today: Satisficing

It’s important to start with a definition of satisficing, because it really does explain one of the most important aspects of online User Behaviour. First coined by Herbert Simon in 1957, satisficing is intended to describe a cross between satisfying and sufficing.

How satisficing applies to User Behaviour

When was the last time you visited a webpage and carefully examined all available navigational options before deciding which one to click on? By comparison, when was the last time you arrived at a website and clicked the first thing that significantly caught your attention?

My guess is, that you will all fit quite comfortably with the second scenario. Tim Ash (author of Landing Page Optimization) explains this:

Most people do not want to invest additional time without a good sense that they will find a better answer. As soon as they find a solution that is good enough, they often stop looking.

So you can see then, that by rapidly scattering our attention all over any given web page, we will enable this satisficing process to occur with maximum efficiency. As soon as we see something which holds just a little bit of promise, we will click on it. This is a fundamental behaviour of the vast majority of web users.

The main reasons why people satisfice

Steve Krug describes these reasons amongst others in ‘Dont Make Me Think – a common sense approach to Web Usability’. Here are the important ones:

• We’re in a hurry
  Life is busy and there’s always stuff to do. The less time everything takes us, the better. The possibility that we could quickly choose something which proves to be fruitful, has the attractive potential for saving us time.
• There’s always the back button
  It used to be said that the back button was the second most used feature on the web. It’s now reported to be the third. This means, that out of every 3 things we do, 1 of them will be pressing the back button. The reason is, we’re not afraid of making mistakes. It doesn’t matter if we make the wrong choice; we can always go back and choose again.
• Careful selection doesn’t always work
  We’ve grown up in a world with websites that haven’t always been designed with the needs of the user in mind. Navigation doesn’t always make sense, links don’t always give a clear or reliable indication of destination (‘click here’), and the functional features of websites are constantly evolving and don’t always do what we expect.

What people scan in order to satisfice

Great, so now you know that people rapidly scan your webpages to facilitate this behaviour called satisficing. But what do people scan? What grabs their attention? I’m sure you could add more items to this list, but the main items which people scan are:

• Headings (both main headings, and meaningful subheadings)
• Bulleted lists
• Emphasised text (bold, not italicised)
• Links

1. Headings

People assume that your headings are clear indications of the content that follows. People will scan your headings to decide whether to slow down and read what comes next. In some situations, your headings alone should be all that people need to read to understand the main points of the page.

2. Bulleted lists

Lists were built for scanners! As such, they are incredibly powerful tools. For example, did you scan the list of 4 things just now? People scan lists because they deliver key points succinctly which saves time. They can be used both to summarise key points, while also serving as navigational links to more specific information.

3. Emphasised text

Have you ever finished someone’s sentence for them or used 1 word to convey specific meaning to a friend (maybe a word that triggers a memory, or shared experience)? The point is, we don’t always need an entire sentence to satisfy our required level of understanding. Sometimes having your key point in bold tells people all they need to know.

4. Links

Links are the signposts by which we assess a website’s potential. The first thing we all want to do when arriving on a new site, is to confirm that it contains at least the hope of answering our need for information or task completion. Links tell us ‘what we can do here’. They indicate deeper levels of specific information, as well as items of functionality.

How scannable is your website?

Now that you know how people scan websites, you can review your own to make sure it communicates well. Look at your headings, lists, emphasised text and links to make sure that the main points are obvious by scanning those elements alone.

The next piece in the puzzle, is to make sure that you are using the right words on your website. If you haven’t already, nip across and read my post on Do You Speak The Same Language As Your Website Visitors?

Before you go, leave me a comment below to let me know what you thought of this post