Using Headline & Blurbs on News Homepages
The vast majority of news websites' homepages use a combination of headlines and accompanying blurbs to entice site visitors to click through to stories. This is standard practice at nearly all major news websites, and the majority of smaller ones. (Examples: WashingtonPost.com and Guardian.co.uk.)

Another approach is to stick to just headlines, without blurbs. While not as common, you can find this homepage approach on websites of small newspapers and TV stations, especially. (Examples: the CJOnline, Daily Triplicate, and KAAL-TV news sites; such sites often highlight a single story -- using only one blurb on the page -- then use headlines only for the rest of the page.)

Just about every news website falls somewhere in between.

In one part of the Eyetrack III research, we created two mock websites with homepages that were identical except for a single variable: one included headline/blurb combos for all article links, the other included only headlines. Click on the thumbnails below to see the pages.

Homepage No. 1

Homepage No. 6

Here's what we observed.

Finding: Blurbs encourage reading and scrolling on homepages.

We found a statistically signficant difference in the time spent on homepage No. 1 (headlines only) and No. 6 (headlines + blurbs). Our test subjects spent 70 seconds on average viewing the blurbs homepage, and only 51 seconds with the headlines-only page.

In an effort to try to explain the difference in the time-on-page values, we discovered a marginally statistically significant difference in the percentage of headlines read vs. the percentage of headline + blurb combinations read. The homepage with blurbs exhibited more entries viewed, more reading, and more scrolling overall than the headlines-only page.

Take a look at the heatmaps of homepages No. 1 and 6 below. (A heatmap is an aggregate image showing overall eye activity on a webpage. Red-orange areas indicate the most eye activity, blue-black the least.) Click the thumbnails to enlarge.

Heatmap homepage No. 1

Heatmap homepage No. 6

As you can see from those overall page images, more people browsed down the entire page of headlines -- and saw more story links -- when there were blurbs. On the no-blurbs page, viewing concentrated mostly on the topmost list of headlines, without spreading as much through the rest of the page. (The purple X's in the images record where individual study participants clicked.)

Overall, people scrolled more on the blurbs page, as can be seen on the heatmap of that page by the increased coverage of the elements on the right column. This was due at least in part to the fact that, on average, readers on the blurbs page chose to return to the homepage one more time during their allotted viewing period for this particular mock website (three times) than did those on the headlines-only page (two times), giving them more opportunity to scroll and peruse the blurb homepage's offerings.

It's interesting to note that even if we adjust for the fact that more scrolling occurred on the blurbs page, there still exists a marginally statistically significant difference in the degree to which the headlines + blurbs combinations are read more.

Homepage No. 1 - No blurbs © Eyetools, Inc. Less than 50 percent of the group looked to the headlines below the bottom of the first screen.

Homepage No. 6 - Blurbs © Eyetools, Inc. As much as 75 percent of this group sought more information on the homepage in the headlines below the bottom of the first screen.

Also, it's worth noting that clicks were more dispersed throughout the page on homepage No. 1 (the headlines-only page). On homepage No. 6 (the headlines + blurbs page), about 50 percent of the clicks on the page were for the top two headlines.

The table above shows the number of clicks on headlines by all the participants while they looked at either homepage No. 1 or No. 6. (Half of our participants viewed No. 1, the other half viewed No. 6; no participant saw both pages.)

You'll notice that the average number of clicks per participant is exactly the same for each homepage: 1.6. (This figure represents participants viewing the homepage more than once during the 5 minutes we allotted them to view this homepage and its accompanying article pages.)

It's worth stepping back for a moment here to reflect on the significant power that visual design and content elements have to define the reader's experience. With the addition of a simple, seemingly innocuous blurb element, we shifted the flow of a reader's visual review of the page and redefined the content that readers selected.

Finding: Blurbs boosted overall reading across the entire page.

The chart below shows the percentage of people seeing each of the headlines on homepages No. 1 (headlines only) and No. 6 (headlines + blurbs). You'll notice that the two bar charts are somewhat similar, though the chart for the blurbs page shows generally higher percent-viewing figures across the board. A notable exception to this is headline Nos. 4 and 5, which received less viewing on the headline + blurbs page because the existence of the blurbs pushed these stories further down the screen, causing them to be viewed less because of that placement.

The images below (click the thumbnail to enlarge) show the order of the headlines cited in the chart above, for reference.

Homepage No. 1

Homepage No. 6

Finding: When blurbs are available, people use them half the time as they make a selection.

We found that 49 percent of participants who clicked a particular headline on the headline + blurbs homepage actually looked at the accompanying blurb. The other half never looked at the blurb, just the headline.

Finding: Average number of clicks per person were identical for headlines-only and headlines + blurbs homepages.

It's interesting that the average number of clicks per participant was the same for homepage No. 1 (headlines only) and No. 6 (headlines and blurbs): 1.6. As noted above, this represents the total number of times that our participants clicked away from the homepage in the 5 minutes we allotted for them to view this particular mock website.

A distinction between the two was that, on average, homepage No. 6 had one more return to the page than did homepage No. 1. That would seem to indicate, when considered in light of the same average number of clicks on each page, that the headlines-only page caused people to decide to stop the task of viewing this mock website during reading of an article -- whereas the headline + blurbs page motivated people to return to it one last time before signing off for the task.

The time we gave participants to view this website was enough to browse multiple sections, skim several articles, and/or fully read one or two.

Finding: People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs.

When blurbs are seen at all (as they were by about half the test participants who viewed our page with blurbs), viewing is primarily on the left third of the blurb.

Below is a series of close-ups of article blurbs from heatmaps of homepage No. 6. The red-orange-yellow areas indicate the highest viewing, which is concentrated on the left side of the blurbs.

Tips

• Using blurbs with headlines rather than headlines-only seems to help disperse interest throughout a homepage (down the page). Recognize that a list of headlines-only high on the page might not get people to look as much on lower portions of the page.
• The use of blurbs does not appear to affect the number of clicks per headline -- it just redistributes the clicks. If you have some stories that you want to get people to more than others, you might want to use blurbs with those headlines and place those stories near the top of the homepage.
• If you're going to use blurbs, remember that the first few words may matter most. Our findings indicate that very few people go to the trouble of reading all of even short blurbs. Most people don't invest much time in deciding whether or not to click through to an article, so keep head/blurb combos succinct.

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