Should Reading Behavior Affect Your Content Design?

Have you ever asked yourself whether your site visitors actually read everything on your website? Sure you have. And reading patterns are an important factor to consider when writing and designing marketing, informational and branding content, which is structured and presented differently than longer narratives.

User eye-tracking research has shown that most people initially scan the first few sentences somewhat thoroughly when taking in large chunks of content — resembling the cross-bars of an F — but read less and less as they continue down the page. Eventually, they only skim the content’s left side in a straight line (or its right side in languages that are read right to left, like Hebrew, Japanese or Arabic).

Many of your site visitors will absorb only the beginning of each sentence or paragraph further down a page, a fraction of your content, to find information quickly.

This reading pattern is called the F-Pattern.

Based on this behavior, it is important to adjust the structure of your informational content and its design: