Hmmmm... I'm sure it'll need a linked scientific study to actually back up the claim. (And every speed-reading product I've seen has usually had a decrease in comprehension rate...)
It's a clever idea, but anecdotally, from my experience, I'm finding it slows down my reading -- I'm having a hard time processing the blurbs because I don't read "linearly" -- I scan content to find the relevant parts, and the color changes are making it difficult to scan (because my eye can no longer use color to determine what is scannable and what isn't), and multiple columns is actually making it even more difficult (it looks like the blue in column 1 leads into the blue in column 2, instead of the blue at the next line of column 1). By trying to force me to read line-by-line, instead of scanning efficiently, it's making me read slower.
But that's just for short-form stuff. It could turn out to be faster for some layouts, and slower for others. But honestly, I've never felt I had difficulty locating the start of the next line... is this a problem that needs solving? But nevertheless, it's certainly a good example of clever out-of-the-box thinking.
I normally read around 600 to 1000 wpm (depending on how dense or vapid it is). This speeds up my reading wayyyyy past that. 1500 wpm? And I was barely trying. It does look super fucking ugly, but it totally works for me. They need to bring in an army of designers and make software geared towards legal assistants / lawyers because they need this desperately.
I don't think they're claiming this as a "speed reading" product in the traditional sense. They're saying it increases reading speed when reading the way most people do, which is line by line. It's certainly not likely to be useful for the kind of reading where you need to scan. But for fiction and other writing that is meant to be read linearly, the claims they're making seem plausible.
What it doesn't help with is transposing from adjacent lines when reading the middle of a column, which happens to me all the time. The middle of the column is always black, so there's not much of a cue to keep you on the same line.
In making my workaround to get a similar effect in calibre, I made a variation I much prefer which cycles red->green->blue, so that column centers are always easy to separate.
I suspect that there's a threshold effect going on: if you naturally read faster than a certain speed, certain design tricks will actually make you read even faster. If you naturally read slower, then those same tricks slow you down.
Would love to see it confirmed or falsified.
(As a note, I am probably under this hypothetical threshold; I'm not a slow reader, but I find that efforts to speed up my reading speed generally push it down instead.)
I was actually surprised at how good it was for linear reading - i.e. reading everything without skipping or missing any line. I'd use it for things like contracts and important tutorials/ebooks, where every word counts.
But I agree that it sucks for quick scans - the different colors just add another layer of complexity for our brain to process...
I found my eyes 'jumping' from word to word. I didn't miss any, and I went to the correct lines, but I did seem to be reading at a much slower clip. But that's from spending 30 seconds reading the webpage, so not very scientific.
It might not be a problem for you - it isn't for me either - but many others suffer from this problem. My other half struggles to read because she has so many line transition errors. And she has to spend all day reading. I see a huge market for this.
For large blobs of text, I wrap around to the wrong line often enough to be annoying. However, I found that highlighting my spot and re-highlighting every 5 lines or so solves this problem.
Regarding your scanning approach. An idea I've had is to format each word based on how common it is.
I did find it easier to read faster, however I do believe the JFK portion was chunked with a lot of bigger words/data like years, cities, full names whereas the SBA paragraphs were simpler (IMHO).
It said I had a 15% increase. not too sure about that, but one thing i definitely did notice was that was I kept reading the beeline sentence my brain was 'remembering' what I had just read.
I 'constantly' have to re-read entire paragraphs because I realised I've looked at them without really taking anything in. It was really strange to feel like i was processing the text as I was reading it.
I'm initially inclined to dismiss this as ugly and distracting, especially with the default colors being very similar to the traditional link/visited HTML colors. It would be worth exploring further if the claimed improvements are true.
I'd especially be interested in exploring ways to incorporate this into better designed color schemes so that it doesn't look so much like a unicorn vomited on the page while preserving the benefits and usability.
I'm also less inclined to dismiss improvements like these after misinterpreting the occasional email from colleagues lately. I don't know if it is assuming I know the full contents from the 3 line summary on mobile devices, processing too much email, or simply not paying enough attention but I've had to slow down and make sure I get things right.
"Nice" colorschemes are probably less useful here since nice usually means harmonious. The point is to maximize your brain's ability to unconsciously distinguish them, so red/blue is a good choice if you need a lot of help. If you're more sensitive to colors, then the grayscale is probably a better choice.
>A study designed and carried out at Stanford University showed an average reading speed increase of over 10 percent for first time users of BeeLine Reader. Many seasoned users experience speed increases of 25 to 30 percent!
So why isn't the study linked?
Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.
I was ready to call B.S. on this but after actually seeing it in action, it seems very reasonable. I wonder why this hasn't been done before. I happen to skip lines very often, I'll definitely try this out.
EDIT: Some feedback after reading a Cracked article with it.
First of all, since the inception of the Readability bookmarklet I've always read online articles with some kind of tool (I started with Readability, then passed to the Safari version and now I've been using Clearly for quite some time and I'm pretty happy about it) and now I'm so used to it that if a particular article doesn't render properly, I just straight out don't read it. The first thing I noticed is that the coloration is applied even to single-line titles, I would do away with it and (maybe) apply it only on multi-line paragraphs' titles. The other thing that irked me is that small images are put on the left side instead of being centered, even worse is the fact that text appears on the right side of the images; I would follow Clearly steps in this regard and always put the text under the centered images. Lastly, I would reduce the text area to 600px of width or better yet, dynamically size it so as to accommodate around 60 characters. As far as I can tell, you totally nailed the font size.
I tend to skip lines or re-read lines when reading, and I was surprised at how applying this gradient helped me continuously read their homepage. Definitely going to see how I can use this to improve my reading comprehension!
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback—we are talking with Evernote about Clearly integration. They have a great platform and we hope to integrate with them soon!
Others have pointed this out but: "BeeLine Reader is a patent pending technology" Well, there goes any respect I might have had for this. It is not obvious in every respect, but this is such a basic idea, trying to control it for 20 years while people perhaps find it useful and build this feature everywhere is absolutely destructive. I hope their patent is rejected.
Although it is fair to have an opinion about this based on personal experience, remember that performance when reading is a personal matter (anecdotal evidence: the crowd that highlights text for reading [1]; scientific evidence: dyslexia).
So it is good to remember that it might or might not work depending on the way your individual brain works, independently of what the person next to you gets from it.
Having recently looked into speed reading a bit, this seems to do a quite good job at filling the role of a pacer without actually requiring any manual interaction by the reader. Nice work! Easily beats trying to pace yourself with the mouse cursor or text selection at least, while actually preserving pages mostly as-is.
For some reason the color gradients changed the intonation with which I read it--so the whole thing sounded, in my mind's ear, like an eighties valley girl, replete with uptalk, aka the "moronic interrogative."*
"BeeLine Reader is an exciting new technology? That helps people read faster? On computers?"
Maybe I'd get used to it. But if not, a 100x speed increase wouldn't be worth having that in my head. Like, all day?
Wow, It feels like the first time I tried glasses. It completely removes any chances of me missing a line. I have a low dyslexia and this just works. Thank you !!
My gut feeling (and the websites I enjoy reading, and what I recently did to my blog) is that line skipping is due to too long lines combined with little font-size and line height. But of course, not all eyes/eye-brain systems work the same, and I'm sure this will be more helpful to some than larger fonts with larger line heights.
Line height, line width, and font size, are the 3 elements of a body of large text that must be balanced. There is some basic arithmetic to this, and it appears everyone seems to ignore it. (HN's design is a perfect example of the 'meh' attitude toward readability.)
The testing methodology is quite flawed (at least for the reading speed test on the site). It asks you to read a passage with BeeReader to start out. When you're done, you're presented with questions about the passage before reading a non-BeeReader passage.
The catch is, you will almost certainly read the second passage slower than the first, since you're now looking to retain information for the questions!
The colored passages _feel_ faster, but I'm not sure that counts for much.
It did tell you it was gonna ask questions. Anecdotally I read the second paragraph faster because I had an idea of the difficulty-level of the questions involved. (ie not very)
> The BeeLine bookmarklets ... may only be used for personal, non-commercial use. ...available for a limited time ... subject to our privacy policy.
Surely the author is not claiming that putting color on text gives them som sort of patentable intellectual property? If this takes off and people will start incorporating this on their blogs, this company will become one of the biggest patent trolls.
Yikes, harsh crowd here. So many people demanding scientific studies to back up the website's claims.
Better idea: Chill out. Then take 1 minute and read some stuff with it on. If you think it feels better try it for longer if not move on with your life.
No has claimed to cure cancer here, just that formatting text differently might give marginal increases in reading speed.
It's not that clear-cut. There's a real reason to ask if there's studies here, because it's not easy to self-assess if this actually works. Reading is more than just "how fast can I scan the lines in order" - it's also about comprehension, eye fatigue, etc. All of which are hard for an individual to assess casually.
I think this is interesting, but I'd want to see studies on what the incremental cognitive load of "color matching" (not something I'm particularly great at) does to reading comprehension, and what the impact of this is on how much I can read in a sitting. It's no good if you read 50% faster but tire out 3X as fast.
BeeLine Reader applies a color gradient to text that helps reduce "line transition errors" [...] This increases reading speed, particularly on mobile devices that have small screens and short lines
Err. Line transition errors are common on mobile devices, not because lines are short (the shorter the line, the less common line transition errors are), but because people are usually moving, walking, etc while holding a mobile device.
So this is obviously a problem, right? We had MagicScroll [0] which got a ton of positive hits, and now this. I believe there have also been a few other attempts along the way as well. The crux of the issue is velocity+comprehension.
I don't like magicscroll because of the way the lines scroll down; I find it disconcerting. In the case of Beeline, I can't stand the color scheme.
The goals of both software are admirable and I'd love to see more work in this space, but I don't think either of them have it exactly right. If the designer is on here, consider using an interior design color picker website[1] to find a color scheme that works better than the current one.
In short, this is a problem and it would be valuable to somebody like Amazon if it were polished, IMHO.
Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone! There are two reasons that the color scheme on the front page is so bright (and to some folks, ugly).
First, we wanted to make it really obvious what's going on, and if we'd used a subtle color gradient, it wouldn't have been as obvious. We realize that many/most people won't ultimately use the bright color scheme for one reason or another.
The second point is that people perceive color differently, so what is bright to one person may not seem so bright to someone else. There tend to be age-related correlations/causes here--it's why old people tend to wear lots of bright blues. To them, the blues don't look as bright. What we've found is that younger folks tend like the more subtle colors (eyes are more sensitive) and older folks tend to like the brighter colors (because they can't perceive the color difference in the subtle schemes). We anticipate rolling out our product/feature with a color picker palette so that users can choose the right color scheme for their visual physiology.
Thanks again for all the comments and suggestions, and please feel free to email us through the website if you have an app/site that you'd like to use BeeLine with. We have some code that will make integration pretty easy.
I definitely noticed that I could read faster with this. And the colors were super obnoxious, so grayscale was my choice. What I would really appreciate was if it could be done without taking it out of the page I was already on.
I would really appreciate some way for it to automatically do it and not take me to a new page, maybe something I could install into my browser?
[+] [-] crazygringo|12 years ago|reply
It's a clever idea, but anecdotally, from my experience, I'm finding it slows down my reading -- I'm having a hard time processing the blurbs because I don't read "linearly" -- I scan content to find the relevant parts, and the color changes are making it difficult to scan (because my eye can no longer use color to determine what is scannable and what isn't), and multiple columns is actually making it even more difficult (it looks like the blue in column 1 leads into the blue in column 2, instead of the blue at the next line of column 1). By trying to force me to read line-by-line, instead of scanning efficiently, it's making me read slower.
But that's just for short-form stuff. It could turn out to be faster for some layouts, and slower for others. But honestly, I've never felt I had difficulty locating the start of the next line... is this a problem that needs solving? But nevertheless, it's certainly a good example of clever out-of-the-box thinking.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|12 years ago|reply
What it doesn't help with is transposing from adjacent lines when reading the middle of a column, which happens to me all the time. The middle of the column is always black, so there's not much of a cue to keep you on the same line.
In making my workaround to get a similar effect in calibre, I made a variation I much prefer which cycles red->green->blue, so that column centers are always easy to separate.
[+] [-] saraid216|12 years ago|reply
Would love to see it confirmed or falsified.
(As a note, I am probably under this hypothetical threshold; I'm not a slow reader, but I find that efforts to speed up my reading speed generally push it down instead.)
[+] [-] cbsmith|12 years ago|reply
Either way, quick experiment shows it to be horrid for me.
[+] [-] jotm|12 years ago|reply
But I agree that it sucks for quick scans - the different colors just add another layer of complexity for our brain to process...
[+] [-] gnicholas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johndavidback|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Blahah|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rejuvenile|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo686|12 years ago|reply
Regarding your scanning approach. An idea I've had is to format each word based on how common it is.
[+] [-] thejacenxpress|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrinningFool|12 years ago|reply
Then I read it. Fast. Consuming nearly at a paragraph at a glance when I usually can digest only a fragment of a sentence up to a couple of sentence.
It's not attractive, but it is clever and innovative - well done!
[+] [-] conroy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbles|12 years ago|reply
I 'constantly' have to re-read entire paragraphs because I realised I've looked at them without really taking anything in. It was really strange to feel like i was processing the text as I was reading it.
[+] [-] dkersten|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mutagen|12 years ago|reply
I'd especially be interested in exploring ways to incorporate this into better designed color schemes so that it doesn't look so much like a unicorn vomited on the page while preserving the benefits and usability.
I'm also less inclined to dismiss improvements like these after misinterpreting the occasional email from colleagues lately. I don't know if it is assuming I know the full contents from the 3 line summary on mobile devices, processing too much email, or simply not paying enough attention but I've had to slow down and make sure I get things right.
[+] [-] kemiller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Miyamoto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staccatomeasure|12 years ago|reply
What I'm worried about is comprehension.
[+] [-] jere|12 years ago|reply
So why isn't the study linked?
Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.
[+] [-] cliveowen|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: Some feedback after reading a Cracked article with it.
First of all, since the inception of the Readability bookmarklet I've always read online articles with some kind of tool (I started with Readability, then passed to the Safari version and now I've been using Clearly for quite some time and I'm pretty happy about it) and now I'm so used to it that if a particular article doesn't render properly, I just straight out don't read it. The first thing I noticed is that the coloration is applied even to single-line titles, I would do away with it and (maybe) apply it only on multi-line paragraphs' titles. The other thing that irked me is that small images are put on the left side instead of being centered, even worse is the fact that text appears on the right side of the images; I would follow Clearly steps in this regard and always put the text under the centered images. Lastly, I would reduce the text area to 600px of width or better yet, dynamically size it so as to accommodate around 60 characters. As far as I can tell, you totally nailed the font size.
[+] [-] jggonz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrangle|12 years ago|reply
FWIW, I liked it.
[+] [-] opminion|12 years ago|reply
So it is good to remember that it might or might not work depending on the way your individual brain works, independently of what the person next to you gets from it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4839436
[+] [-] Daiz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnny99|12 years ago|reply
"BeeLine Reader is an exciting new technology? That helps people read faster? On computers?"
Maybe I'd get used to it. But if not, a 100x speed increase wouldn't be worth having that in my head. Like, all day?
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
[+] [-] simlevesque|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simlevesque|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RBerenguel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slackwise|12 years ago|reply
Line height, line width, and font size, are the 3 elements of a body of large text that must be balanced. There is some basic arithmetic to this, and it appears everyone seems to ignore it. (HN's design is a perfect example of the 'meh' attitude toward readability.)
I think this article does a good job of visually explaining this balance and how to accomplish it: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography....
[+] [-] burgeralarm|12 years ago|reply
The catch is, you will almost certainly read the second passage slower than the first, since you're now looking to retain information for the questions!
The colored passages _feel_ faster, but I'm not sure that counts for much.
[+] [-] woebtz|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps the aggregate A/B numbers make a more compelling case for using BeeReader?
I wonder if the color combo choice has any affect on the speed/comprehension of the text.
[+] [-] calipast|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qu4z-2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsviridov|12 years ago|reply
This thing combines the old Readability bookmarklet with the gradient. I saw the improvement right away, following the line is much easier now!
tl;dr - this is awesome!
[+] [-] marincounty|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|12 years ago|reply
Why not show me the stats? I'd like to know, even if it doesn't confirm what you want it to.
[+] [-] zapt02|12 years ago|reply
Surely the author is not claiming that putting color on text gives them som sort of patentable intellectual property? If this takes off and people will start incorporating this on their blogs, this company will become one of the biggest patent trolls.
[+] [-] skizm|12 years ago|reply
Better idea: Chill out. Then take 1 minute and read some stuff with it on. If you think it feels better try it for longer if not move on with your life.
No has claimed to cure cancer here, just that formatting text differently might give marginal increases in reading speed.
[+] [-] tomkarlo|12 years ago|reply
I think this is interesting, but I'd want to see studies on what the incremental cognitive load of "color matching" (not something I'm particularly great at) does to reading comprehension, and what the impact of this is on how much I can read in a sitting. It's no good if you read 50% faster but tire out 3X as fast.
[+] [-] __alexs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrb|12 years ago|reply
Err. Line transition errors are common on mobile devices, not because lines are short (the shorter the line, the less common line transition errors are), but because people are usually moving, walking, etc while holding a mobile device.
[+] [-] josh2600|12 years ago|reply
I don't like magicscroll because of the way the lines scroll down; I find it disconcerting. In the case of Beeline, I can't stand the color scheme.
The goals of both software are admirable and I'd love to see more work in this space, but I don't think either of them have it exactly right. If the designer is on here, consider using an interior design color picker website[1] to find a color scheme that works better than the current one.
In short, this is a problem and it would be valuable to somebody like Amazon if it were polished, IMHO.
[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re... [1]http://colorschemedesigner.com/ as an example.
[+] [-] gnicholas|12 years ago|reply
First, we wanted to make it really obvious what's going on, and if we'd used a subtle color gradient, it wouldn't have been as obvious. We realize that many/most people won't ultimately use the bright color scheme for one reason or another.
The second point is that people perceive color differently, so what is bright to one person may not seem so bright to someone else. There tend to be age-related correlations/causes here--it's why old people tend to wear lots of bright blues. To them, the blues don't look as bright. What we've found is that younger folks tend like the more subtle colors (eyes are more sensitive) and older folks tend to like the brighter colors (because they can't perceive the color difference in the subtle schemes). We anticipate rolling out our product/feature with a color picker palette so that users can choose the right color scheme for their visual physiology.
Thanks again for all the comments and suggestions, and please feel free to email us through the website if you have an app/site that you'd like to use BeeLine with. We have some code that will make integration pretty easy.
[+] [-] gamerDude|12 years ago|reply
I would really appreciate some way for it to automatically do it and not take me to a new page, maybe something I could install into my browser?
[+] [-] gnicholas|12 years ago|reply