How Little Do Users Read?

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for May 6 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html
			
Summary:
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words
during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
				
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Usability Week 2008 conference

  > London, May 19-24
  > San Francisco, June 16-21
  > Melbourne, July 21-26

In-depth training:
  > 3-day Intensive Camp: Usability in Practice
  > 3-day Immersion: Tog on Interaction Design

Specialized full-day tutorials:

  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > Application Usability (2 days)
  > Intranet Usability (2 days)
  > Websites That Sell
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Writing for the Web
  > B2B

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

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WEB PAGES GETTING FATTER

Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB:
a growth rate of 82%/year.

(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users
with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across
40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

  > http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page

My comments:

(a) First, let's remember that almost half of the Internet users still
don't have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact,
FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.

(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it's still 130% slower than the
1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow
while navigating.

(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response
times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code
snippets, and "widgets." Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to
interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

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WHAT MS CAN DO WITHOUT Y!

Now that Steve Ballmer has earned his bonus for the year by walking from
overpaying for Yahoo, he needs to do something else with his $50B. One
idea I would like him to try is to refund some of the outrageous sums
harvested by search engines.

a) Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines
currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search
engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep
link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search
engine. Value proportion to users: When you search on engine X, you find
stuff that's otherwise not available.

b) Give back to the users. For example, pay IT departments for redirecting
all searches emanating from their company to engine X. Value prop to
advertisers: if you want to reach the B2B audience, you need placement on
our SERPs because that's all business users see in 70% of the Fortune 500.

Finally, and most importantly: improve basic search performance. For
example by creating human-readable summaries of the search results instead
of the horrible 2-line snippets currently used.

One idea is to hire a million people (probably no more than ~$1B/year) to
use an instrumented browser that requires them to pass judgment on the
usefulness of every search hit they visit. This data could allow sorting
the SERP by usefulness instead of popularity and thus vastly improve the
quality of searches.