Online Journalism Blog

I have one word to summarize this article:

Perfect.

It’s short. It’s catchy. It keeps you reading more.

Wait. Does that make me a lazy bastard, too? Probably.

But it’s true and everyone else is one.

We love short sentences, like the ones I used to start this entry, with bold-face words that attract our eyes.

• We love bulleted lists, too
• We love subheads

Why? It’s just easier!

We are informavores, meaning we hunt for interesting informations and facts. When a site does not seem to have what we want, we quickly move on to one that does.

Long texts are a no-no for writers, so it’s best to keep it simple.

When reading online, it’s important to:

• Read default fonts designed for screen reading, such as Verdana, Trebuchet and Georgia.
• Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes
• Do not keep screen too close to your face

Pleasure (Ludic) reading:

• When we like a text, we read more slowly to understand it
• When we’re engaged in a text, it’s similar to being in an effortless trance

Jakob Nielsen brings about quite an interesting topic with the world turning to their mobile phones for nearly everything nowadays. Although this change is happening, people won’t be able to comprehend as much on their phone screens as they would on a computer.

The reasons are simple:

• Slower downloads
• No mouse for an easy selection
• Small screens, especially when compared to a computer screen
• Application UI’s lack consistency

“It’s much harder to understand complicated information when you’re reading through a peephole.”

I love this quote. It’s so true!

After an analysis that Nielsen did of Facebook‘s privacy policy featuring text that only people with at least one year of university education would find easy to read, the results were obvious:

• Desktop screen: 39.18% comprehension score
• Mobile screen: 18.93% comprehension score

In order for a text to be considered easy to read, the score must be above 60%, so even the desktop screen comprehension was only 2/3 of the desired amount.

This brings up all-important questions:

What makes mobile reading harder?

Why is it approximately twice as hard to understand complicated content when reading on the smaller screen?

The smaller screen.

1. Because users see less at any given time than they would on a computer screen.
2. Because users must move around the page more, needing to scroll around different pages rather than seeing it all right in front of them on a normal computer screen.

That’s why mobile reading is more difficult.