Industrial Blogs – Summary or Full Page?

Jakob Nielsen’s latest usability post had some interesting findings about how people read corporate blogs.

“On corporate blogs, summaries are usually superior to full articles because they let you expose users to a broad selection of topics. Offering more topics increases the likelihood that users will find something that really interests them and thus will click through to read more. (As opposed to leaving.)”

Interesting, because we were seeing similar trends lately and changed our blog’s home page to have summaries rather than full articles. (What do you think of the change?)

We had been seeing a large number of bounces, even though the average time on site was pretty good. It will be interesting to watch our analytics to see if page views or time on page increases or if bounces decline now that we’ve revised to show summaries.

Also, we have heard from our visitors that they really like it when we use images on our posts, commenting that the images really “get their attention.”

Nielsen commented about the eye tracking findings regarding photoblogs saying, “…it’s easier to scan a long list of photos than to read.”

Eye tracking studies that support our thinking are great, but we really want to see actual clicks through to our blog posts. You can bet we’ll be watching to see if our articles with images have a higher click-through rate and if we can increase page views.

Have any of you seen similar trends on your industrial blogs?

Share this: