Want to know where your surfers' eyes look?

[Simon]

Okay... this may not be for everyone, and doesn't have much to offer those who build mostly TGP pages and galleries, but...

This study was done regarding "news" websites, but some of it can be valuable to anyone who develops sites/pages with lots of text, Some real blogs, for instance, would fall into this group. Anyway, just offered for those it can help. Not a short or quick read, so you may want to mark their page for reading later.


The Best of Eyetrack III:
What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
By Steve Outing and Laura Ruel
Eyetrack III project managers

Article url:
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm

Some snippets:

Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page -- especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right. Photographs, contrary to what you might expect, aren't typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen -- both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.

Want people to read, not scan? Consider small type
The Eyetrack III researchers discovered something important when testing headline and type size on homepages: Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured*their attention.

Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs on the homepage. This may be related to a phenomenon that we noted throughout the testing: visual breaks -- like a line or rule -- discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break, like a blurb. (This also affects ads, which we address below.)

Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. On our test pages, text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average.

Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen. Small ads on the right side of homepages typically were seen by only one-third of our testers; the rest never once cast an eye on them. On article pages, "half-page" ads were the most intensely viewed by our test subjects. Yet, they were only seen 38 percent of the time; most people never looked at them. Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text. "Skyscraper" ads (thin verticals running in the left or right column) came in third place.

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There is a LOT more in the article at...
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm


Simon