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Font Size on News Homepages
Most news website homepages do not allow readers to adjust
the font size of the page they are viewing. What you see is
what you get. In part of the Eyetrack III testing, we designed
two identical homepages and included overall font size as
a variable. Half of our participants saw one homepage with
larger type, the other half saw a homepage with smaller type.
Homepage No. 4, below (click to enlarge), used smaller type.
EYETRACK III FINDINGS
This report is one of many from the Eyetrack
III study of broadband-era news websites.
46 people were tested for one hour
each in December 2003 by Eyetools
Inc. in partnership with the Poynter
Institute and the Estlow
Center. During the test period, each test subject viewed
mock news websites created for research purposes and real-world
multimedia news features. Results were published in September
2004.
Homepage No. 9, below, used larger type.
This particular homepage design featured a mix of headlines
with and without blurbs.
Finding: Smaller font size results in a little more careful
viewing of the page.
Our other Eyetrack findings suggest that the overall size
of type used on a homepage (both blurb text and headlines)
has a marginally significant impact on viewing: On pages with
smaller type, participants read more and were drawn into the
blurbs. On pages with larger type, there's more scanning
going on and less concentrated viewing (less reading) of the
words.
Beyond statistical testing, researchers inspected the data
for behavioral clues to help us decipher what might have accounted
for the slight differences between the two pages. We observed
on homepage No. 9 (large type)
that more people spot-checked the page and looked at just
the headlines, and then selected headlines on that basis alone.
In contrast, we observed on homepage No. 4
(small type) that more people viewed the blurbs before clicking
on a story, often reading them. Our confirmation of this theory
came from two additional inspections that we conducted.
First, we speculated that people would read the blurbs more
often on homepage No.4 (small type) than on No. 9 (larger
type). We found that 88 percent of the group that looked at
homepage No. 4 read blurbs at least once before clicking;
62 percent of the group that looked at homepage No. 9 read
blurbs at least once.
To test that this affect was real, we confirmed that the
inverse might also be true -- that more people would read
only a headline on No. 9 than on No. 4. We found that 30 percent
of the group on No. 9 clicked to article pages after reading
only the headline without ever reading a blurb; that figure
was 6 percent of the group on No. 4.
While this sample size is too small to claim that this tendency
can be extrapolated to a general population, we found it interesting.
The heatmaps
below for homepages No. 4 (small type) and 9 (large type)
exhibit the visual patterns we saw. (A heatmap is an aggregate
image showing overall eye activity on a webpage. Red-orange
areas indicate the most eye activity, blue-black the least.)
Click the images to enlarge.
Finding: Disparity in font size seems to make a difference
between scanning and reading behavior.
Where viewing of text (especially blurbs) falls off is where
there's a wide disparity between font sizes. The larger the
headlines are in relation to blurbs the less likely it is
that blurbs will be viewed or read. When headlines and blurbs
are the same size, and that size is small, then both are viewed
or read more often.
An interesting point -- brought out in our comparison of
homepages No. 4 and 9
as well as elsewhere in our testing -- is that readers seem
willing to make the effort to adjust their reading style to
overcome whatever strain might be associated with use of smaller
font sizes. With larger font size and especially larger headlines,
people seem to be less likely to "work hard" in
viewing content beyond the headline.
Eyetrack researchers surmise that once a person is focused
on granular information that is not easily skimmed (i.e.,
small type), it is easier to continue in that mode to view
whatever text might be close at hand (like a blurb).
Finding: Sometimes, content trumps format and presentation.
On homepage No. 9, the one with
larger font size, the lower portion of the page was not read
nearly as much as the lower portion of homepage No. 4,
the smaller-font page. But, on No. 9 there was one story positioned
low on the page that attracted a lot of interest: the headline
"Craigslist: Now It's a Movie, Too."
Now, Craigslist is a San Francisco online institution, and
Eyetrack III testing took place in San Francisco. It seems
fair to believe that Craigslist has high recognition for many
residents of the city. Participants in this study looked at
the blurb heavily on this story -- on both the small-font
page and the large-font page.
On the small-font homepage (No. 4), this heatmap detail shows high viewing rate for several article blurbs
On the large-font homepage (No. 9), the heatmap detail shows low viewing for article blurbs, except for the Craig's List story (largest orange area).
The way eyes found "Craig's List" is an example
of how content can override the format of a page and its presentation.
The people who mostly scanned the large-font page (No. 9)
found this story of high interest to them, then zoomed in
to look at the detail (the accompanying blurb).
Tips
Here are some tips based on what we found in this part of the
research:
- Is the intent with your website's homepage to encourage
scanning or to encourage concentrated viewing? If you want
your readers to fix their eyes on the homepage for longer,
you might want to use smaller type in headlines and blurb
copy. If you want to encourage scanning behavior, larger
headlines may help.
- If your desire is to have website readers examine all
or most of the type on your homepage, you may want to keep
headline size and blurb size comparable.
- For pages using larger type and contrasting-size type, the
words on a headline are important. With an audience that
you know is scanning, the choice of words is critical.
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