Site visitors/readers give designers the benefit of the doubt. They invest in the first paragraph … but for subsequent copy they are less generous. Where’s the beef? What am I getting for all this reading? When the payoff is not there in the first few lines … (Really, how engaging is YOUR company’s copy?) … they start skimming .. which manifests as reading the first handful of words of the first line or two in subsequent paragraphs. And the F pattern emerges from the blues and green heatmap mist.

It would be interesting to see a (public) comparison of the before & after reading trace for content that had been improved both typographically and in terms of content (appropriate level,… with a gated-guided path, leading to clear actionable steps). My hunch is that the F would fade. What do you think?