Eyetrack behavior may surprise you
Here are some more preliminary findings from Eyetrack III, as reported by E&P:
Home pages that ran blurbs underneath headlines tended to cause a drop off in reading -- when compared with home pages that ran headlines only....Home pages that had clean breaks at the fold (the bottom border of the page visible in a Web browser when the page first loads) typically got fewer views below the fold. In other words, it might be best to avoid lines or other graphical elements which may suggest to viewers that the page ends at the fold....
Photos? They typically got far less eyeballs than text. The one caveat is that photos with recognizable human faces in them did tend to get more glances. Not surprisingly, size is also a factor. But still, text gets a lot more action on news sites.
On shorter, less-packed home pages, the navigation and advertisements got more looks from users. Also, top navigation tends to get looked at more than left-hand nav bars....
On every type of mock news page presented, users discerned where the ads were and ignored them.... Not only are readers not clicking; they're not even looking. The one exception in this study was a simulated all-text classifieds section similar to the "Top Jobs" feature that runs on some newspaper Web sites. Quite a few eyeballs stopped on those ads.
Another low eyeball section? The lower right-hand corner of the Web page. No matter what was there, users tended to avoid looking at this graveyard of a space....
The study also shows that multimedia elements don't necessarily increase reader recall and comprehension of the content. So in some cases, presenting news the old-fashioned way -- in plain text -- may be best way to use new media.
May 10, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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