The layout itself is not confusing, since people know what to do with it. When I say that “this layout is not confusing”, I mean that readers have these clear intuitions for what to do in these situations. You might think that the “rule” of reading comic page layouts is “left-to-right and down”, like text, and thus this layout is confusing. In other words, the “rule” in their minds is that, they should read downward in blockage layouts. So, these results show that readers have a preference for the proper reading direction. But, there’s a good reason for this: the question we were asking wasn’t “how do people read these layouts?” but rather “what are people’s preferences for ordering these layouts?” Having no content works just fine for doing good science and factoring out confounding variables, and it answers our question of whether people have preferences for orders: yes they clearly do. Yes, these experiments presented empty panels, which might be different than if content is included. Now, one criticism people have about these studies is that they don’t have content in the layouts. In simple grids, we find 90% of responses choose to follow the Z-path (i.e., go right) instead of choosing other paths. As I said in my previous blog post, this rate is essentially the inverse of what we find for pure grids. Or, conversely put, less than 10% of choices in these situations followed the “left-to-right-and-down” Z-path that follows the order of written text. We found that for blockage layouts, around 90% say “down”.
For this layout, the key experimental findings came from two studies presenting people with empty page layouts, and then asking them to choose the order that they would read the panels. Most of the claims I make about page layouts are based on the experiments that I and others have done about them. One of my more engaged-with blog posts of recent memory reviewed the data for whether the panel arrangement on the right was “confusing.” So, here’s a post with some additional thoughts on this and the “rules” of comic page layouts**…įirst off, let me remind people that I’ve given this layout a name: When you have a vertical stack of panels next to a tall panel, I call it “blockage.” You can find terms (and science!) related to page layout in my book and my scientific papers (also linked throughout).
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