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 start to finish?
If you are like most of today’s internet readers, you probably just scanned the text looking for 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 merely scroll through articles, rather than engaging with their content.
And what about books? Here, 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 – thanks to it, you don’t have to flip through the entire manual. You go straight to the chapter that describes the topic you are interested in.
So why do most online articles lack such a table of contents? You might respond that they are too short and don’t need one. I completely agree with you. However, most texts that I come across are really extensive, and a table of contents would greatly facilitate navigating through them.
Additionally, long texts rank faster (achieve higher positions in search results like Google). Furthermore, Tim Brown (the owner of the IDEO agency, where design thinking was born) claims that the longer the text, the better it is. Based on the analysis he conducted, he believes that 1000 words is just the minimum, and the goal is 2500 words. The popular blog buffer stated that a post should be read in 7 minutes. This gives us about 1600 words.
The text you are currently reading has 1117 words.
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