Website Readability as a Key Performance Indicator

Creators of interactive media have for too long downplayed the importance of readability. But a few recent developments—including the launch of Safari Reader—promise to change all that. We now have an opportunity to quantify and track Website Readability.

The topic of readability on the web has, I’m happy to announce, undergone a  much needed rejuvenation in the past year and a half. Starting with Mandy Brown’s excellent A List Apart article from February of last year and culminating, most recently, with the introduction of Safari Reader in the latest version of Apple’s popular web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, readability has always been an important consideration in interactive design. But it does seem to me that it’s now poised to take center stage. And it’s frankly about time. Arc90 didn’t create their ingenious Readability bookmarklet—the predecessor to Safari Reader—in a vacuum. They created it because they perceived a real need.

Over at Webmonkey, Scott Gilbertsson writes that the “advent of Safari Reader seems to have galvanized a point of view that’s been brewing for a while: Webpages are too cluttered and difficult to read.” I’m only too happy to concede that point. Unlike many of my peers, I’ve never found otherwise well-designed sites such as the New York Times to be very reader-friendly.

Call me old fashioned but I prefer peace and quiet when I read. This is probably why I’ve taken my refuge in Google Reader (flavored, of course, by Helvetireader from Hicksdesign). And I’m not the only one. Google Reader generates somewhere around 150 million hits per day (Compete.com, 2010). And it’s far from the only RSS reader out there.

Now, I’m not confusing correlation with causation here. All I’m saying is that it makes perfect sense for people to prefer the tranquility of their RSS reader to the increasing complexity of your average, run-of-the-mill, news website. Just look at how Phil Gyford decided to improve upon the website of a well-known UK paper when he created Today’s Guardian.

Again from Gilbertsson: “The primary purpose of Today’s Guardian is to make reading news articles easier. For Gyford, that means eliminating distractions — sidebars are gone, comments zapped, menus pared down and page navigation radically simplified.” And it truly does work. Today’s Guardian does offer superior readability.

But it would seem that improved readability comes at a price. Advertising—an important source of revenue for any publisher—needs to be stripped out. Social features such as commenting and sharing face similar fates. And so the question on everybody’s minds right now is “Where do we draw the line between readability and, well, everything else?”

I won’t pretend to know how to answer that question. To be honest, I haven’t even made up my mind whether this is a zero sum game at all. But what I do know is that Safari Reader—and its equivalents, present and future—will enable us to find an answer with time—albeit on a case-by-case basis. By tracking the percent of users that opt for an “as-is” vs. “reader” view of our content, we should be able to quantify our success in balancing business objectives with overall website readability.

I posit this new metric be called, simply, Website Readability. And I, for one, intend to make it staple Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) for most, if not all, of my future web projects.