Ordinarily being the kind of insufferable nitpick to chafe at minor spelling infringements, I was surprised to learn that the master login page I've been using for going on two years now ... well, it ... Amazingly, none of the other 10+ folks who use this page -- many of them daily, for thousands (at least) of combined page views among them -- noticed the typo in glaring h1 font either, until someone went to access it through a handheld and was forced by the unfamiliar display to, as it were, read it anew. Like this guy. It's really quite an astonishing testimony to the (necessary and valuable) filtering exertions undertaken constantly by the eye and the brain -- first, that I "know" the word is "administrator" and so I don't bother to really read it; and second, that I don't need the word anyway to interact with the page. And the latter recalls this summer's fascinating eyeball-tracking study showing the way users really read newsletters, a quick F-shaped scan that sweeps past most of your artfully turned phrases.

Users are extremely fast at both processing their inboxes and reading newsletters: the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds. "Reading" is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters. The predominant user behavior was scanning. Often, users didn't even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content. People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions.

Holiday donation appeals are about to go out. Will the parts your users see make them click the link? Or will parts you're not seeing make them click "delete"?