A series of studies spanning 13 years, involving over 500 participants, and more than 750 hours of eye-tracking time has recently been published by Nielsen Norman Group. As online design has changed, new reading patterns have emerged. The rise in popularity of comparison tables and zigzag layouts (where text and images alternate in each row on the page) has coincided with the emergence of the lawn-mower pattern: reading from one side to the other then flipping around and reading in the opposite direction. Also, the rich, diverse layouts of modern SERPs caused the development of the pinball pattern, where the user scans a results page in a highly nonlinear path, bouncing around between results and SERP features.
However, despite these new patterns emerging, the study concluded that fundamental behaviors remain constant, even as designs change. People scan rather than read, and very rarely scan all of the content on a page. Even when users do scan content in its entirety, they never scan it perfectly linearly. They still jump around pages, skipping some content, backtracking to scan what they skipped, and rescanning content they’ve already scanned. Technology might have changed rapidly over the last 13 years, but humans haven’t. Read more on this here.