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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.
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Web-design pages:
main : academia : info-design : adding value : resource-pages : lessons-learned : best-worst : plugging leaks
Special topics:
surfing-skills : url-hacking : open content : semantics : pagelength : linktext : startpages : bookmarklets : weblogging : colors : autobiographical pages : thumbnail-graphics : web-video : timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth : page-parsing : firstcut-parser : html-history : semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal : dense-content faq : annotated lit : random-access lit-summary : poetry sampler : gossipy history : author-resources : hyperlinked-timeline : horizontal-timeslice : web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com : Altavista.com : 1911encyclopedia.com : Google.com : IMDb.com : Perseus.org : Salon.com : Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab : design-checklist : HyperTerrorist : design-theory : design cog-sci
Search this site Search full Web
Before you leave this site: Be sure you've checked out Jorn's weblog which offers daily updates on the best of the Web-- news etc, plus new pages on this site. See also the overview of the hundreds of pages of original content offered here, and the offer for a printed version of the site.
Hosting provided by instinct.org. Content may be copied under Open Web Content License.
The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a t
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a tiny screen, a sore wrist, a cranky disposition, and an "I'm not gonna scroll" attitude; if you don't want to lose them, you'd better put everything they need at the top of the page, within the first 300 pixels or so." Bldr96
"Long Web pages full of dense text are difficult to read. Users tend to skim Web pages, looking for information that's relevant to them or captures their interest. Interminable pages, unrelieved by subheadings, graphics, or similar visual breaks, quickly lose reader interest. In general, if the content can be broken into several short pages worth (about one-and-a-half to three 640x480 screens), it's best to do so." UPRR
"If the content requires longer pages, be sure to use plenty of visual aids, such as subheads, paragraph breaks and graphics, or multi-page document formatting to break up long text blocks into shorter chunks for easier reading." UPRR
"According to Jakob Nielsen, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, Web users are impatient and goal-driven, and their reading speed is slowed down by on-screen text. For these reasons, users do not read long blocks of Web text carefully or thoroughly. As Nielsen says, "Web users tend to just scan sites, picking out the little snippets that are of interest to them." To accomodate these users, Nielsen suggests thinking about how you would cover a topic in print and then cut the word count in half. "People are not going to read every single word. Acknowledge that," he says. "Restructure the site to take advantage of hypertext." To handle longer documents, Nielsen recommends making a brief introductory page that tells readers precisely what it is about. That page can then be linked to sidebars and background information." NAU99
"In most cases it is best to have shorter pages (two to three screenfuls) with links to related pages. Visitors sometimes become disoriented or bored when they are forced to scroll through long documents. By giving them more digestible pieces and forcing them to be an active participant moving between different pages, you will make them feel more in control of their visit. However, do not make the visitor travel through too many layers before finding content. The rule of thumb is that they should encounter content pages within three layers, or clicks, from the home page." L&C97
"Most designers say that a page shouldn't be more than one or two pages long. There are two reasons for this; the first is because new users don't know how to scroll down. The second is visitors start to loose interest after the first page because the longer a web page is the harder it is to read and keep concentrated on." Unev99
"Pages which require viewers to scroll down several times to read the full text are likely to lose readership. The old journalistic rule of put the most important information at the top of the article and then follow with progressively less important details applies to the Web. At Desert Horizons, we strive for short pages, typically no more than three "screenfuls." (A screenful is the amount visible on a guest's screen at one time; multiple screenfuls indicates the number of times a visitor has to "page down" to see the full content.)" DHoz98
"...people are very, very critical... they will give you like a few seconds that if you don't give them that immediate gratification of something useful, they're out of there, because they have five million other places to go." JN9910
Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
"The most important point here is that a document should put across a well-defined concept. It is not generally worth splitting one idea arbitrarily into two bits in order to make the bits smaller. Nor is it a good idea to put together ideas which are really separate just to make a bigger document. A document can be as small as a footnote ." W3C95?
"Most current personal computer monitors display 640 x 480 pixels on 13- to 15-inch screens. Designing your pages so that the information is presented in short, clearly segmented chunks will make it easier to keep pages concise." Moz3
What if the reader wants to print it?
Everybody agrees that it's best to offer a one-page version for printing and/or saving. Cites: Sun95, Strl97, Jdsn99, AuYale96, L&C97, Moz3
What if the reader wants to search it?
Nobody mentions that the browser's search function works best on a single page.
What about net-wide search engines?
Nobody mentions that if the article is broken up, its sections will be indexed separately and so will not deliver as many search-engine hits.
Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
"If the page is longer than one or two screens, with several distinct sections which are not visible on the first screen, it's a good idea to add a short hyperlinked list of the sections at the beginning of the page. This serves two purposes: First-time readers get an immediate sense of all the topics covered, while returning readers can quickly tell if a page contains what they need and navigate directly to the section they want. This page, as well as most of the others in the Style Guide, is an example of the use of the hyperlinked list of contents at the top of the page. Beware of overusing this feature, however. If the document has just one or two sections, or if all the sections are rendered visible within the first screen, using the hyperlinked list is probably gratuitous." UPRR
How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
"2) Don't require more than four clicks on the scrollbar to get to the bottom of a page... 18) Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to 4. If it's more than that, you may have to re-consider your navigation scheme." Htbx
Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
This one is argued both ways:
"Advantages with longer documents are that ... one doesn't have to go to the trouble of making (or generating) so many links and keeping them up to date if things are altered." W3C95?
"Use shorter pages to make your web more maintainable. If you're going to be changing your documents frequently, it's usually easier to swap several short files than change the middle segments of longer ones. (And if you break something, your whole web isn't out of commission!)" Sun95
"One of the primary advantages of online documents is that they can be rapidly updated. In practice the editor or 'webmaster' of a large WWW site is constantly swapping in new updated files for old ones. In well-designed modular system pages covering particular topics can be updated quickly without needing to change large sections of information or re-format complex pages. The concept is essentially similar to the loose-leaf procedural manuals most organizations use to keep paper documents reasonably up to date by replacing old sections for new, except that WWW systems offer much more flexible and economical means of keeping information fresh and up-to-date. The primary strength of the WWW medium is easy links between related pages of information. This style manual is organised in a modular system that allows us to quickly replace, add to, or update particular sections. This offers the reader both the long-term stability they expect in a familiar reference source, and the timeliness they expect from online documents. The Web stays the same, but the pieces could change by the hour." AuYale96
Will people scroll all the way to the end?
"A rough guide, then, for the size of a document is: For online help, menus giving access to other things: small enough to fit on 24 lines." W3C95?
"Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If the page is only as long as the default browser window, your reader will see all that you present in a glance, and won't have to guess about what's below the edge of the window. Some content must be presented in one screen because the user cannot tell if there's more to be seen below the edge of the window... Keeping pages short will reduce the possibility that a block will be "orphaned" beyond the bottom edge of the browser window." Sun95
"In early studies, I found that only 10% of Web users would scroll a navigation page to see any links that were not visible in the initial display. The vast majority of users would make their selection from those links they could see without scrolling. In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box: You always design dialog boxes so that all choices are visible (except for tabbed dialogs which are known to have severe usability problems; and the tabs do indicate the amount and nature of the hidden options)... There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to chose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore, I still recommend trying to design navigation pages to make all major choices visible without scrolling on the monitors used by the average visitor to a site. Also, the likelihood of making the best choice from a navigation page is maximized if the user can see and compare all the options at the same time without having to scroll and remember the hidden choices. " JN9712
"90% of users used not to scroll navigation pages but simply pick from the visible options. This has changed since most Web users now know that pages scroll and that important links sometimes are not visible "above the fold." Even so, the visible options still dominate and users sometimes overlook alternatives lower down the page. This is particularly bad if the visible part of the page seems to clearly communicate a certain purpose or a certain best approach: users may then happily conclude that they know what to do and not bother spending time on the rest of the page." JN9905
"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page. Note added December 1997: More recent studies show that users are more willing to scroll now than they were in the early years of the Web. I still recommend minimizing scrolling on navigation pages, but it is no longer an absolute ban." JN9605
"On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail." JN9606
"Keep the visual limits of the browser window in mind when deciding what the user will see when they first enter your page. Like the fold in a newspaper, the bottom edge of the browser window will stop some people from reading further. If critical data is buried two or three screens deep, some readers may never see it at all. If the important information is relegated to the first browser window, readers will be sure to drink it in within the first visual gulp. When creating directional pages, such as bookmark, sub-bookmark, index or table of contents pages (referred to as "directional" because they're primarily lists of links), it's a good idea to put the links toward the top of the page, or at least to start the list high enough for some of the links to be visible without scrolling. This will let users know that the page is actually a directional, rather than a content page, containing links to additional information." UPRR
There's also a specialised text-to-voice problem:
"If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)" Strl97
Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"A good rule of thumb for writing a page meant to be read onscreen is to make it no longer than two to three 640 x 480 screens' worth of information, including local navigational links at either the beginning or the end of the page layout. If you make the page longer than the window, your reader has to remember too much information that's already scrolled off the screen." Moz3
Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
Nobody mentions what's probably the real reason most sites with advertising prefer multipage design-- to push more banner ads in people's faces.
Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
Yes, server logs will show how many readers took the trouble to click on the subsequent sections.
Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
This one seems unanimously wrong, and can probably be traced to the misapplication of some early experimental results.
"The other limit is the difficulty for a reader to scroll through large documents. Readers with character based terminals don't generally read more than a few screens. They often only absorb what is on the first screen, as if that is not interesting they won't be bothered to scroll down. Readers are also put off by being left at the top of a large document. Readers with graphic interfaces generally scroll through long documents with a scroll bar. When the scroll bar is moved a small amount, the document should move a sufficiently small amount so that some of the original window-full is still left in the window. This allows the reader to scan the document. If the document is any bigger, then it is basically unreadable, in that any movement of the scroll bar will loses the place and leaves the reader disoriented." W3C95?
"Users with dyslexia may have problems reading long pages and will be helped if the design facilitates scanability by proper use of headings." W3C98
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Many human interface researchers and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling computer screens is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the Web site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long pages. This argues for navigational Web pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about one to two 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long Web pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links are not visible..." Yale97
"When you put information on a Web page, be cautious of making the page very long. If you intend for your page to be read online do not make it so long that the user must scroll very much. Avoid bookmark links that simply jump down on the same page. Cut the information up into smaller pages and make links to those pages. For home pages and pages with big graphics you should keep the page length even shorter." Jdsn99
"Many critics and designers of graphic user interfaces have noted the disorienting effect of scrolling on computers screens. This loss of local context within scrolling pages is particularly troublesome when basic navigational elements like linkages to other local pages in the World Wide Web (WWW) site disappear off-screen as the user moves through very long HTML pages. This argues for navigational WWW pages (home pages and menus in particular) that contain no more than about two to three 640x480 screens worth of information, and which feature local navigational links at both the beginning and end of the page layout. Long WWW pages require the user to remember too much information that is currently scrolled off the screen; users easily lose a sense of context when the navigational buttons or major links have long since scrolled off the screen:" AuYale96
"...once you get beyond about four screens worth of information the user must scroll so much that the utility of the online version of the page begin to deteriorate. Long pages often fail to take full advantage of the linkages available in the WWW medium." AuYale96
Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, and get frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling, and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page... As a general rule of thumb, try to make the majority of your pages no longer than one-and-a-half screenfuls of text, and you will probably not get into too much trouble. If you have doubts, ask for feedback from members of your intended audience." Sun95
"Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling." JN9801
"Scroll bars One major disadvantage of very long WWW pages is that the user must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider (the little box within the scroll bar) to navigate. In most graphic interfaces (Macintosh, Windows) the scroll bar slider is also fixed in size, and provides no indication of the document length relative to what's currently visible on the screen, so the user gets no visual cue to page length. In very long WWW pages small movements of the scroll bar can completely change the contents of the screen, leaving no familiar landmarks to orient by. This gives the user no choice but to crawl downward with the scroll bar arrows, or risk missing sections of the page." AuYale96
"A disadvantage of a very long Web page is that the reader must depend on the vertical scroll bar slider to navigate. Small scrolling movements can completely change the screen contents, leaving the reader no familiar landmarks." Moz3
Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
"Don't overwhelm people by putting links to your entire site on the same page. It's better to create a hierarchy and present just the top level on the home page. When visitors are given too many choices at once, they may become overwhelmed, leave, and never come back." Bldr96
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The WWW page-length debate
Jorn Barger January 2000
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include:
* # How long will it take each section to display?
* # How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
* # Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
* # Is it easier to understand if different concepts are on separate pages?
* # What if the reader wants to print it?
* # What if the reader wants to search it?
* # What about net-wide search engines?
* # Which will make it easier to find a particular section?
* # How many clicks will it take to find the desired section?
* # Which will make it easier to maintain the pages?
* # Will people scroll all the way to the end?
* # Will people forget what's scrolled offscreen?
* # Can you make more banner ad money with multiple pages?
* # Can you track readers better with multiple pages?
* # Is it disorienting to scroll thru a long document?
* # Are scrollbars unpleasant to use?
* # Are too many choices unpleasant to see at once?
Below are quotes on these topics from many different web style guides, with a link to the guide after the quote.
There are also a few comments of my own.
How long will it take each section to display?
"There are two upper limits on a document's size. One is that long documents will take longer to transfer , and so a reader will not be able to simply jump to it and back as fast as he or she can think. This depends a lot on the link speed of course." W3C95?
"1. First, your main page (including HTML, graphics, etc.) should be under 60KB in size, and at the maximum should take 30 seconds to download at 28.8. "Less is more"; just take a look at Yahoo!, the most popular website on the Internet." Htbx
"The size of a web page should be under 50K in total. This will take 15-30 seconds for the average visitor to download and people don't link waiting longer than that." Unev99
"In addition to readership loss, long pages also take longer to load." DHoz98
None of these comments differentiate between pages with TABLEs, where the text usually doesn't display until the whole page is loaded, and pages without TABLEs where it displays right away. (BLOCKQUOTE can be used for margins without adding any delay.)
How much will it disrupt the reader's concentration to load a new section?
"Advantages with longer documents are that it is easier for readers with scroll bars to read through in an uninterrupted flow, if that is how the document is written." W3C95?
"Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than does following a link. This advantage lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context... There is a rhythm established for a reader by your text, typography and layout. Retrieving a new page by clicking on a link introduces a delay that will break that rhythm. This unavoidable pause of a few to many seconds is something that you must take into account when deciding how long a page should be." Sun95
"Scrolling still reduces usability, but all design involves trade-offs, and the argument against scrolling is no longer as strong as it used to be. Thus, pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor." JN9712
"If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages." Strl97
"If the document content is such that people will want to read it at length (such as a chronology, a long article, or a related series of topics too short to break into individual pages), it's all right to use longer, scrolling pages. Scrolling the browser window allows a reader to advance in the text with less loss of mental "context" than following a link... The advantage of maintaining reader comprehension through scrolling lasts up to about four screenfuls of text. After that, there is a tendency for people to lose their context, getting frustrated with the mechanism of scrolling and their inability to keep track of what's elsewhere on the page." UPRR
"The cost of this is that people abandon--they flee from--Web sites. They look at the opening screen, and then there's an exponential dropoff as they are asked to drill down more deeply. They drop off maybe 80 percent on each layer they go to." Tufte
Is one long page more boring than several short pages?
"All users complained when they retrieved pages with a screen or more of unstructured text. They plainly did not want to read much, and at best scanned the text for important or relevant paragraphs. The users liked information that was presented in lists that were easily scannable... Long pages (more than a screen) were only deemed acceptable when users could quickly decide to ignore most of them and focus on the relevant parts (e.g., a list of Microsoft networking products organized by operating system)." JN94
"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good." JN9703
"Set an upper limit to the amount of text you put on each page; somewhere between 200 and 500 words per page is reasonable. (You should decide on a specific number based on your audience, your content, and how text fits into your site's overall design.) You can always continue long articles on another page... Visitors might have a t