Try to remember 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 beginning to end?
If you are like most of today’s internet readers, you probably just scanned the text for topics of interest. I guess you read the headlines and tried to catch what seemed to be most important to you.
This is confirmed by numerous studies, including a study by NNGroup from 2008, which shows that users only engage with 20-28% of the content on the page. A similar study was conducted by analysts at Chartbeat in 2013, confirming that most users just scroll through articles without engaging with the content.
And what about books? I mainly mean professional or scientific books here. You usually read such books in their entirety. 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 entire textbook. You go straight to the chapter where the topic you are interested in is described.
So why do most online articles not have such a table of contents? You’ll probably answer that they are too short and do not need one. I agree with you 100%. However, most of the texts I encounter are really extensive and a table of contents would significantly improve navigation through them.
Moreover, long texts rank faster in search engines (achieving higher positions in search results such as Google). Further, Tim Brown (owner of the IDEO agency, where design thinking was born) claims that the longer the text, the better. Based on the analysis conducted, he believes that 1000 words is merely the minimum, and the goal is 2500 words. The popular blog buffer states that a post should be read in 7 minutes. This gives us around 1600 words.
The text you are reading now has 1117 words.
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