How our brain skim through the content (website &mobile app)

Cibin K.S
Cibin K.S
Nov 2 · 3 min read
Brain skimming the content in website and mobile app

We skim through the content all the time.

Our brain is designed to consume less energy and get precise and needful information.

For this, it uses certain patterns to consume content, by identifying these patterns we can create content that has a higher chance to grab the human brain’s attention.

There are 6 + skimming patterns for our brain.

How people skim through content

It will use all these patterns separately or combined with one another in different situations accordingly.

Understanding the skimming pattern of the brain lets the UX designers get into the user’s shoes.

Let’s get started.

F shaped pattern

F shaped reading pattern

This is the most commonly used skimming pattern of our brain. Our eyes scan the web/mobile content like an F shape.

We first scan the header or headline from left to right. Then check or another headline or sub-headline just below the main headline. After that, we go straight to the bottom or end of the article by fixing your focus point to the left-hand side of the screen.

In psychology, it is called the serial position effect (Primacy and recency effect). It states that people have a tendency to remember the first and last items of a series.

Serial position effect in psychology

Layered cake pattern

If we are looking for some particular information our brain uses this layered cake pattern to find if the content is relevant or not.

Here we run through the main headline and sub-headlines from start to end.

Layered cake pattern - a method for scanning content

Spotted design

Spotted design is used for a quick scan. It will be used when the user wants to know whether there is something that is interesting for him/her.

Spotted design for consuming content from web and mobile

The user will skip a big chunk of text and scan the totally for specific action areas — links, digits, or a set of words with distinctive patterns.

Marking pattern

This pattern is mostly seen in mobile users. In simple terms, this is what we do when we scroll through Instagram feeds.

In this pattern, the user keeps the eye’s and focuses in one place, then scroll through the feed or swipes page.

Marking pattern: fixing eye in one spot and scrolling through the feed

Bypassing pattern

The bypassing pattern is used when people used to reed content formats like long article or PDF documents. These kinds of articles will contain a repetition of some words. And our brain easily identifies it at the first place itself.

To save that energy, the user will skip the first word of multiple lines because they all start with the same word and reads the whole article.

Bypassing pattern: skipping the first and similar words

Commitment pattern

Commitment pattern: reads everything in that page

Cibin K.S

Written by

Cibin K.S

UX researcher with a background in product marketing and growth

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