Jencis's List: Reading On Screen

• When it comes to reading long form, the web can be an ugly, distracting place. It’s the reason why services like Instapaper and Pocket (née Read It Later) exist: to strip content of its context — noisy site designs, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements. But perhaps we’re moving into a new era where more of the web is clean and readable. Maybe the future of web publications will be beautiful enough that the reading experience is more enjoyable in its natural habitat.
• The piece is generously adorned with accompanying visuals — photos of Ellis, memorabilia like trading cards, pull quotes, all moving and sliding while the reader scrolls. The reading experience is very comfortable on both desktop and tablet, thanks to a larger text size and generous amounts of white space. It feels like an experience instead of a block of words surrounded by the detritus of the web.
• he truth, in what we found, is that people are psyched about longer stuff that’s in-depth and beautiful,” Topolsky said.
• Pitchfork goes horizontal
• They fall somewhere between The Verge’s templated-but-designed and ESPN’s highly-customized approaches. Though most of the profiles so far appear to use a similar template and design language, the tone and aesthetic of each piece is drastically different.
• Pitchfork takes advantage of the dynamic features of the web.
• animates pull quotes as the reader scrolls; and appropriate for a music site, there’s an embedded music player that persists throughout the layout, featuring a selection of playable tracks from the profile subject. These things improve the Cover Story features not just in terms of readability but tonality, existing to supplement content but never distracting from it.
• “I’m less excited about the bells and whistles,” said Michael Renaud, a creative director at Pitchfork. “This level of control just provides the opportunity to present content in a more traditional layout environment that gives focus to the story itself.”
• e more complex a design, the harder it is to make it look beautiful on varied screen sizes — readers seem to be reacting positively to these designed pieces.
• Even within publications, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent nomenclature for it. Pitchfork makes a distinction between “dynamic” and “standard” viewing experiences; at The Verge, Topolsky says they simply call them “feature layouts.”

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• As is pointed out in the app, the problem with the web is not that it’s full of fluff. It’s that, done right, there’s too much that is smart and interesting. The question is how to hold on to any of it. 
• So Sloan turns to his central metaphor: fish. It stems from the story of historian Louis Agissiz. He would put students in a room with a fish on a metal tray and tell them to look at it, for hours on end. Though they would become exasperated, he would send them back again, and tell them to keep looking–at which point they would then start to uncover a startling plethora of details. The idea is both simple and profound: when we return to something repeatedly, we discover anew. We rarely return to anything online. So: an iPhone essay called “Fish”. 
• that flow is the endless digital flood, and stock is the durable stuff that has a significantly greater half-life.
• But what Fish seems to suggest is that physical is only one kind of anchor–and that we need a digital one, too. We often think about the focus of physical in terms of space: the book, bounded off from all others, thus warranting attention all on its own. But it seems we need to figure out what digital boundedness look like. On screens that are always morphing into something else, delimiting borders is a difficult thing. Digital edges are, by their nature, ineffable and prone to disappearing. So rather than space, what it seems Sloan is arguing here is that we also need to think of how digital reading object might rope off or mark out time: of how we might carve out a temporal anchor in the flood of things that take up figurative space in our minds.

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• Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
• Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji—activate motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive.
• Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared.
• paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders
• Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.
• most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text.
• "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."
• Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
• Supporting this research, surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose
• Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that appears on a screen is not part of the device's hardware—it is an ephemeral image.

  • spatial cognition
• discernible size, shape and weight
• Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information.
• When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way.
• more effectively directed their attention and working memory.
• Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness. Similarly, Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.

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• Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study, thought academics might "find differences in the immersion facilitated by the device, in emotional responses" to the story. Her predictions were based on an earlier study comparing reading an upsetting short story on paper and on iPad. "In this study, we found that paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion, and narrative coherence, than iPad readers," said Mangen.

  But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story. "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order

  • sense of time and sequence is what is affected
• She is now chairing a new European research network doing empirical research on the effects of digitisation on text reading. The network says that "research shows that the amount of time spent reading long-form texts is in decline, and due to digitisation, reading is becoming more intermittent and fragmented", with "empirical evidence indicat[ing] that affordances of screen devices might negatively impact cognitive and emotional aspects of reading". They hope their work will improve scientific understanding of the implications of digitisation, thus helping to cope with its impact.
• what kind of devices (iPad, Kindle, print) should be used for what kind of content; what kinds of texts are likely to be less hampered by being read digitally, and which might require the support of paper," said Mangen.

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• Moving between sites has always been easy. But, from an information foraging perspective, it used to be best if users stayed put because the vast majority of websites were horrible and the probability that the next site would be any good was extremely low. I thus advised early website designers to follow two design strategies:

   
   
  •   First, convince users that the site is worthy of their attention. As I described above, this means having good information and making it easy to find.
   
  •   Second, once they arrive, make it easy for users to find even more good stuff so that they stay rather than go elsewhere. An entire movement was devoted to the idea of sticky sites and extended visits.
   
   

    In the last few years, Google has reversed this equation by emphasizing quality in its sorting of search results. It is now extremely easy for users to find other good sites.
• information snacking
• will visit more frequently, since they have more sessions, will find you more often, and will leave other sites faster.

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• Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website. The term is part of information foraging theory, which explains how users interact with systems using the analogy of animals hunting for food.

•  

    It's good that the user could focus her attention on the information of interest and ignore the rest. When we see people read on websites, it's usually because the site meets two usability goals:

   
   
  •   Good information architecture (IA), with clear navigation that allows users to quickly get to a page that's relevant to their interest. If users are bogged down by slow or misleading navigation, their interest peters out — as does their motivation to read much once they finally arrive on the desired page. Furthermore, each page should be clearly signposted, with a good heading and other design elements that signal that this is indeed the page users need.
   
  •   Good page layout that quickly guides the eye to the relevant part of the page, utilizing well-written subheads to summarize the information in each segment (as in the zoo example).

• Summary: Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.
• or old media, reader goals are well known, ranging from being entertained (when reading a mystery novel) to getting investment ideas (when reading the Wall St. Journal 's "Markets" section).

• various users might approach a given piece of content in different ways:

   
   
  •   Reading the page. Although thorough reading is a fairly rare behavior for Web users, it certainly does happen.
   
  •   Scanning the page to judge whether it's worth reading (or, indeed, whether the site was worth visiting in the first place).
   
  •   Scanning the page to locate specific information, which can differ by user. For example, when looking at digital cameras on an e-commerce product page, sophisticated users might look for sensor size, whereas less knowledgeable users might be interested in megapixel count.
   
  •   Picking items from a list, such as on a SERP (search engine results page), an e-commerce category page, or a news feed. (News feeds are also called RSS, but please remember to avoid this acronym; this year's usability studies confirm once again that many users have no idea what "RSS" means.)
• people mainly read only the initial part of any piece of content. To read beyond that, users must be convinced of the content's value.

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• 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users' main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

   
   
  •   Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
   
  •   Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
   
  •   Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

• A smaller screen hurts comprehension for two reasons:

    
   
  • Users can see less at any given time. Thus, users must rely on their highly fallible memory when trying to understand anything that's not fully explained within the viewable space.  
     
    • Less context = less understanding
     
     
   
  • Users must move around the page more, using scrolling to refer to other parts of the content instead of simply glancing at the text. Scrolling introduces 3 problems: 
     
    • It takes more time, thus degrading memory.
     
    • It diverts attention from the problem at hand to the secondary task of locating the required part of the page.
     
    • It introduces the new problem of reacquiring the previous location on the page.

• Typically, usability findings are stable across many years: 80% of Web usability guidelines from the 1990s are still in force.

   

    Today, users will scroll. However, you shouldn't ignore the fold and create endless pages for two reasons:
• Scrolling beats paging because it's easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page of a fragmented article. (Saying that scrolling is easier obviously assumes a design that follows the guidelines for scrollbars and such.)
• Information foraging theory says that people decide whether to continue along a path (including scrolling path down a page) based on the current content's information scent. In other words, users will scroll below the fold only if the information above it makes them believe the rest of the page will be valuable.
• The two other gaze plots show more common scrolling behaviors: intense viewing of the top of the page, moderate viewing of the middle, and fairly superficial viewing of the bottom.
• It's as if users arrive at a page with a certain amount of fuel in their tanks. As they "drive" down the page, they use up gas, and sooner or later they run dry. The amount of gas in the tank w
• nice morsel at the very bottom.

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• If everything said above sounds too easy and you’re looking for a challenge, another option is to code your EPUB by hand. This feels like programming in a time warp. EPUB is built on such an outdated version of XHTML that half the time you’ll be reminding yourself that everything in the EPUB must be declared in the manifest file (really?), while the other half of the time you’ll be recalling how you used to program HTML in the ’90s.

• t 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

• Web pages have to employ scannable text, using

   
   
  •   highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
   
  •   meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
   
  •   bulleted lists
   
  •   one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
   
  •   the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
   
  •   half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
• credibility is important

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• • Encouraging reading through web formatting techniques 
     
    • Writing styles that improve comprehension
     
    • Using headings, subheadings, and page priority — how to get these right
     
    • Information-bearing words in links and leading sentences, and their positive effect on usability and scanning
     
    • Eye-catching text elements such as capital letters and bulleted lists can create interest. People looked at 29% of words that appear in all capital letters. People look at lists with bullets more often than lists without bullets (70% vs. 55%, respectively).
     
    • Writing for people with low literacy
     
     
   
  • Fixed vs. liquid layout, and column width: The positives and negatives as they relate to scan patterns
   
  • Miscues that entice users to spend fixations on them at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons
   
  • Table layout for easiest data consumption
   
  • Dealing with complex content
   
  • Plan for scanning behaviors 
     
    • Exhaustive review: People look extensively and repeatedly at an area or page because they expect the information
• 300 people aged 18 to 64 years. The method we used is Eyetracking, in which we followed people’s eye movement as they attempted activities on websites.

• 30% viewing the right half.
• 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page
• people look at information above the fold far more than they do at information further down the page

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