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Highlights of new eyetrack research

New eyetrack research shows that text, not photos, grab readers attention first online; that people do people do typically look beyond the first screen; and horizontal navigation is more effective than vertical navigation. The Eyetrack III research was released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools today. This is a must read for anyone who works on the Web.

Here are some of the highlights of the findings, but it's well worth reading through the lengthy report.

Key findings:

Homepages
• The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.
• Most people looked at text, not images, first. Dominant headlines -- not photographs -- most often draw the eye first upon entering the page.
• Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. Their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention.
• Visual breaks -- like a line or rule -- discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break.
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best

Headlines and type size
• Smaller type encourages reading the words more closely, while larger type promotes lighter scanning. Testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type.
• On sites that use headlines and blurbs (as 22 out of 25 tested news sites do), people tended to view the headlines and skip the blurbs when the headline is larger than the blurb and on a separate line.
• Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs underneath.
• On average, headlines get less than a second of a site visitor's attention. The first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.
• Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.

Ads
• Ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations.
• Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen.
• Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested.
• Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen.

Images
• Larger online images hold the eye longer than smaller images. The bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.
• Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.
• People often clicked on photos -- even though on the test pages that got them nowhere (and clicking on photos does nothing on most real news sites).

Multimedia
• Participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text fomat than in multimedia
• But unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.
• Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text, such as step-by-step animations.

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New Eyetracking Study: How do visitors really see your website?
Trackback excerpt: CyberJournalist.net has a good summary of the results of the Eyetrack III study designed to measure what visitors actually look at when they come to a website. Eyetracking is a relatively new technique of recording where on the screen a subject's eyes ... [Read More]

Posted on The Fire Ant Gazette at January 3, 2005 8:13 PM

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