There has been extensive debate in recent years about the attention span of the modern day reader. For a while, everyone was talking about The Statistic Brain’s study that suggested that the average attention span has reduced from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now. That would make your attention span less than the nine-second attention span of your average goldfish. It would also mean that you didn’t finish this paragraph.
However, more recent examination of the subject has suggested that there is a distinction between our general attention spans, and our attention span in relation to digital content. Not only has The Statistic Brain been suggested to be unreliable by the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38896790), but it is far too generalised, failing to consider that our ability to pay attention is entirely dependent on how interested we are in the task we are doing. Although you might only have eight seconds worth of interest in a social media post, you might have hours worth of interest in your favourite book.
So, what does this mean for digital content? Most readers will only read between 20 and 28% of a webpage, and they won’t read it all chronologically. How does our attention shift, and what captures it?
When we open a webpage, our gaze shifts around the page. There are few patterns in which a reader might consume content. A popular pattern is the ‘F pattern’, in which a reader will read a bit at the top, a bit less in the middle, and conduct a general peruse along the first words of several lines. Alternatively, they might read in a ‘Z pattern’; they will read the beginning and end, and scan over the middle.
Some readers are more likely to read in layers, consuming chunks of content throughout the article. They might scan to spot words that take their interest, or they might just choose to focus on the parts that their eyes land on first.
It has also been suggested that word length impacts readers’ ability to focus. According to Rayner and McConkie’s 1976 study, shorter words are much more likely to be skipped than longer words, which may give the illusion of being more important. Three letter words are skipped around 67% of the time, whilst seven and eight letter words are only skipped around 20% of the time.
So, what would engage the reader? Images are an obvious answer. Our eyes are naturally drawn to anything that breaks up text, meaning that it’s almost impossible not to notice an image on your phone or PC.
Short chunks of text are also more likely to be read, as they are quicker than a paragraph, and we therefore seek them out as a means of a quick answer.
For example, you probably read this sentence, but you might have skipped other parts of this article.
Other methods of catching the reader’s ever-moving gaze is by making important information bold, signalling quotations in italics or underlining small parts of your content. You might also want to try using bullet points, or providing a ‘spoiler’ summary at the beginning of the article. None of these things will make the reader read an article in its entirety, but they will draw their attention to the bits they really don’t want to miss. If these parts are useful and engaging enough, you might also tempt them into reading more.
We can’t change the way readers approach digital content, but we can change the way our own is received.
Retail PR Team