Design for how people read
What content designers need to know about how people navigate and process information to complete tasks
People don’t visit your product or service to read it. They visit to use it. They are trying to find something out, make a decision or complete a task. Reading is the way they achieve this goal.
Everyone has a limit
To design good content, you have to understand working memory. Your mind can only hold and process a limited amount of information at once. The demand a task places on that capacity is called cognitive load.
How much capacity you have to focus on a task continually changes. You have less when you’re tired, stressed, distracted, or facing something unfamiliar. Often, it’s a stressful moment that sends you to a service in the first place:
- Applying for a passport for an urgent trip
- Understanding a recent medical diagnosis
- Working out what to do after a council tax arrears letter
Content that takes more effort than the task needs increases cognitive load. People are then more likely to miss things, make mistakes or give up.
Design for everyone
Travelling, getting care, managing your money, voting, claiming what you’re entitled to: all of these involve finding, understanding and using information.
Content that is harder to read than it needs to be makes the whole service harder to use. The people who already face the most barriers often have to do more work to get the same outcome.
Making content easier to read helps everyone. Some people face greater barriers to processing and understanding information:
- Literacy. In England, around 1 in 6 adults have very poor literacy skills.
- Neurodivergence. An estimated 1 in 7 people in the UK are neurodivergent, meaning their brain processes information differently. That includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia.
- Context. Ability isn’t fixed. Differences in how someone processes information can be lifelong, temporary or situational.
Everyone experiences times when they have less capacity: reading urgent instructions on a phone, in a noisy queue, or on low sleep.
Reading takes effort
The physical act of reading takes more effort than you realise. Your eyes move across the page in pauses and jumps:
- Fixations (pauses). The actual reading happens here. Your eyes settle for about a quarter of a second to recognise a word and take in its meaning.
- Saccades (jumps). Your eyes jump to the next word. What you see blurs, and your brain discards it.
- Regressions (backward jumps). Around 10 to 15% of jumps go backward. When you hit an unfamiliar word or a sentence that doesn’t make sense on first read, your eyes jump back to re-read it.
Every regression is a sign that reading has broken down, and it costs effort to recover. Poor writing is one cause.
Remove extraneous load
Cognitive load is made up of 3 categories:
- Intrinsic load. The effort built into the task itself. A medical diagnosis is hard because some conditions are extremely complex. No wording changes that.
- Germane load. The effort of understanding something new well enough to use it again.
- Extraneous load. The effort added by poor presentation: long sentences, jargon, weak structure, or long unbroken text.
A content designer's role is to remove extraneous load so people can focus on understanding the task and completing it. You can't remove intrinsic load, and you shouldn't remove germane load when understanding is part of the task.
Design for scanning
Because working memory is limited, you rarely read a page in full on the first pass. You scan it first, creating distinct eye-tracking patterns:
- The F-pattern. When a page lacks visual anchors, your eyes run along the top, drop to a shorter line below, then scan down the left edge. Most of the page never gets seen.
- The layer-cake pattern. When a page uses clear, descriptive headings, your eyes move down the page and stop at the heading that matches what you came for. It’s the difference between finding an answer and giving up.
- The commitment pattern. You read almost every word. This is rare and usually only happens after a page proves it’s worth the effort.
Use familiar words
Familiar words reduce cognitive load. These are the words you use and read all the time. Your brain recognises them almost instantly, and often skips them entirely. Unfamiliar words take longer to process:
- ‘Start your application’, not ‘commence your application’
- ‘Help with your appointment’, not ‘assistance with your appointment’
- ‘The money you owe’, not ‘the arrears’
A familiar word is processed 20 to 50 milliseconds faster than an unfamiliar one. On its own, that feels tiny. Across a full page, it adds up, especially for someone stressed, tired, or reading in a second language.
People don’t visit to read. They visit to complete a task. Well-structured content helps them find what they need, and clear words help them finish what they started.
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