Readymag templates: Read Me: Magazine

studies suggest that on medium, a popular platform for long blog posts, the average read-through rate is around 40 %—that means only two out of five readers that start reading an article, will actually stick around to finish it (though some argue that there is still significant variance). Readymag Stories project read-through data revolves around the same numbers—by the end of each story, we lose over half of those who began interested.

To make things worse, people almost never consume digital content word by word: instead, they rapidly scan the text. “People scan because they’re trying to absorb as much information as they need,” notes Kate Moran, a Senior User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group.

To make the problem go away, it’s become almost a cliche to blame the reader. According to this view, the public, addicted to everything new and shiny, is almost eager to be bored by text so that they can switch to the next article, video game, insta account, etc.

But what if the problem is deeper, and what is posed as an ethical question is in fact a matter of pure physiology? Some studies suggest that on-screen text might be inherently more difficult to read than printed. That implies that there is no way creators can raise the bar for read-through above a certain level, pre-determined by the properties of a human eye and a human brain.

Still, to increase the chances of their work being seen, great creators work hard to create good content and set it in type, as they always have.

In this essay we offer some advice on how to deal with both.

The question of how to create this kind of metric was asked long before the web emerged—as early as the 19th century. French psychologist Louis Émile Javal provided one of the first known studies of the matter in 1879 with his paper Essai sur la physiologie de la lecture (On the Physiology of Reading).

Javal’s key insight was that readers’ eyes don’t move steadily across the text; they actually make short, rapid movements (saccades), mixed with longer stops (fixations). Javal also noted that sometimes, while reading, the eyes unconsciously move backwards to text the reader has already seen. His idea was that the number of stops and backwards moves might help determine readability level—however, Javal lacked precise tools for the task and the idea was dropped at that time.

Two other prominent approaches came forward later, in the middle of the 20th century.

One was based on the speed of perception, while another emphasized measuring overall eye fatigue. These were pioneered by two researchers, Miles Tinker and Matthew Luckiesh—whose different approaches to measuring readability even led to a certain animosity for each other (you can learn more from a paper by William Berkson).

At the end of the day, Tinker’s idea of speed measurement transformed into the notion of legibility, the ease of distinguishing one letter from another as measured by perception speed. Luckiesh’s fatigue-based measurement became what is nowadays known as readability in a strict sense, the ease of reading a text as a whole—including layout, colors etc—measured using fatigue indicators like blink time.

It can also be useful to distinguish the readability of a text (as a product of writing) versus the readability of text setting. The first primarily evaluates the skill of a writer, while the second has to do with design.

Contrast

The pioneers of readability studies were obviously only dealing with printed text. However, by the end of the 1960s, computers with led screens had become relatively mainstream. Due to their inherent properties, they turned out to be more demanding on the eye.

Glowing screens make the reading experience physically different from a paper that only reflects light—the higher the brightness level, the stronger the effect. “If you set the brightness up much too high, a direct focus of light will come into your retina, causing fatigue,” explains Nick Sherman, a typographic consultant and the founder of hex projects typographic company.