Try to recall the last article you read on the internet. What was it about? Did you find what you were looking for? Did you read it from the beginning to the end?
If you are like most of today’s internet readers, you probably just scanned the text looking for the topics that interest you. I guess you read the headlines and tried to catch what seemed most important to you.
This is confirmed by numerous studies, including the NNGroup study from 2008, which shows that users only familiarize themselves with 20-28% of the content on a page. A similar study was conducted by analysts from Chartbeat in 2013, confirming that most users only scroll through articles and do not familiarize themselves with their content.
And what about books? I mainly mean industry or scientific books. You usually read such books in their entirety. And when you want to quickly find a topic, you use the TABLE OF CONTENTS – it allows you to avoid flipping through the entire textbook. You go straight to the chapter that describes the topic you are interested in.
So why do most online articles not have such a table of contents? You would probably answer that they are too short and don’t need it. I agree with you 100%. However, most texts that I encounter are really extensive, and a table of contents would significantly facilitate navigating through them.
Additionally, long texts rank better (achieve higher positions in search results such as Google). Furthermore, Tim Brown (owner of the IDEO agency, where design thinking was born) claims that the longer the text, the better. Based on a conducted analysis, he believes that 1000 words is merely a minimum, while the goal is 2500 words. The popular blog buffer stated that a post should take 7 minutes to read. This gives us about 1600 words.
The text you are reading now has 1117 words.
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