A new finding was that users often praised the Web headlines for being better than the headlines in print newspapers. It seems that several of the news sites have taken the earlier findings to heart and have started rewriting their headlines for online. It was more than three times as common for users to limit their reading to a brief as opposed to reading a full article. In other words, the most common behaviour is to hunt for information and be ruthless in ignoring details. But once the prey has been caught, users will sometimes dive in more deeply.
Text needs to be scannable, but it also needs to provide the answers users seek.
Doing so is particularly easy on big monitors that show several full-page windows simultaneously, but can also be done on small screens. The Windows task bar facilitates session-interlaced browsing as long as users stay below eight sessions or so. I admit that I was surprised when we started seeing interlaced browsing in 1994. Previous studies had not identified this behaviour, so I originally expected people to browse a specific site and stay with its navigation features until they decided that they were done with it. The lesson for site designers is that users are not focused on any single site.