Try to remember the last article you read online. What was it about? Did you find what you were looking for? Did you read it from start to finish?
If you are like most of today’s internet readers, you probably just scanned the text in search of the topics that interested you. I guess you read the headings and tried to catch what seemed most important to you.
Numerous studies confirm this, including a study by NNGroup 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 just scroll through articles and do not engage with their content.
What about books? I mainly mean industry or academic books. You usually read such books in full. And when you want to quickly find a topic, you use the TABLE OF CONTENTS – thanks to it, you don’t have to flip through the whole manual. 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 might answer that they are too short and don’t need one. I agree with you 100%. However, most texts that I encounter are really extensive and a table of contents would significantly improve navigation through them.
Additionally, long texts rank better (achieve higher positions in search results such as Google). Furthermore, Tim Brown (the owner of IDEO, where design thinking was born) claims that the longer the text, the better. Based on conducted analysis, he believes that 1000 words is just the minimum, and the goal is 2500 words. A popular blog buffer stated that a post should be read in 7 minutes. This gives us about 1600 words.
The text you are now reading has 1117 words.
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