Spotted pattern

A reader arrives with a specific question: what does it cost, is there parking, which day. The gaze plot that comes back is not a path at all but a scatter of isolated fixations down the block, each one landing on a single word and none of them on the sentence it sits in. Nielsen Norman Group calls this the spotted pattern. The reader is not reading and does not intend to. They are running a visual search over the text for the shape of an answer.

What makes the search work is that some words look different from their neighbours. A number, a bolded phrase, a link, a capitalised name, a currency symbol: each is a shape the eye can find in peripheral vision without reading the words around it. That is the whole argument for formatting keywords rather than trusting prose to carry them. Bold the two or three words that answer the question, keep numerals as numerals instead of spelling them out, and let links say the thing being linked to. In flat, unformatted text the same reader finds nothing to land on and the scan degrades: a couple of fixations at the start of the first lines, then the page gets abandoned or scrolled past.

The formatting has to be honest, and that is the constraint people miss. Bolding a whole sentence gives the eye nothing to spot, because a uniform block is uniform whether it is bold or not, and bolding words for emphasis rather than for findability sends the search to the wrong place. Two or three spots per screen is the working budget. It is also worth remembering that a spotted scan is often the first pass rather than the only one: the reader lands on a number, then reads the sentence around it, which is why the answer has to survive being found out of context.

The pattern sits alongside the other scanning shapes eye tracking has named, and it is the one most directly changed by typography rather than by layout. The F pattern and the layer cake pattern describe what dense text and subheaded text get; bypassing describes a list whose items all start the same way; commitment is the rare case where somebody reads every word. Spotted is the one to design for when the reader has a question, which is most of the time.