Webpage Eye Movement Trends
Today I came across this study of user’s eye movements when looking at a web page. This study, named “Eyetrack III” was released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools. Although this study could be influenced by marketing to some degree (Eyetools), the results are very interesting.
This study shows that users are more likely to look at upper left corner before middle center which contradicts some popular guidelines (section 6:4). A particularly interesting find is that the top right corner has the lowest priority by users. The top right corner is often the place links such as “search”, “log in” and “help” live.
Although what they say about small vs big type (I think it is taken out of context, the size of the “small” font is not given), they do have some interesting findings about headlines, underlines and the text it frames. It seems that in blocks of text which have a headline and an underline, people are less likely to read the text underneath (such as a blub).
Something that may be useful for graphic designers is the finding that users retain more from text than graphics. So the next time a customer wants to “pretty” up the page by having you translate an important bit of information into a fancy graphic, point h[er/i]m to this study.
A lot of the findings from this study reinforced what we already know: users scan text, big ads work, and dead zones really are dead. It is interesting to have a physiological vs. psychological user test performed.