The “guru of Web page usability,” as The New York Times calls Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., discovered that “Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult” (Nielsen, 2008). He tells us to left-justify the menu and to avoid using all CAPS, which can “reduce legibility by about 10%”, to not right-justify the text within the left-justified menu, and to avoid using the same words at the beginning of each item in the menu list.
Readers have been found to usually scan a website rather than actual sit and take the time to read it word from word. Nielsen analyzed time spent on about 45,000 web pages that contained between 30 and 1,250 words. He found that the more information that was on the page, the more time users spent on the page. This is common sense, since clearly they are reading more information. He found that if he assumed a reading speed of about 200-250 WPM (words per minute), the user would really only read about 18% of the page (2008).
According to Perez, research indicates that our generation has a short attention span and does not prefer to read long, boring text (2008). Tullis and Tullis indicated a negative correlation between the number of characters of a page and the visual appeal of the page (2007). Little text is defined as the number of words on a web page.