"Eyetrack" study of web pages

[John Kupersmith]

Web4Lib, Usability4Lib --

Here are interesting results of a study from the Poynter Institute that 
tracked users' eye movements on mock news-oriented web pages and generated 
"heatmaps" indicating where they paused and for how long.
< http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm >

Key findings:
* Upper left section of page gets most attention.
* Dominant headlines get more attention than photos ("On average, a 
headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention").
* The first words of a headline, or the left 1/3 of a blurb, get most 
attention.
* Photos larger than ca. 230 pixels wide & deep, showing people's faces, do 
best.
* Small type encourages reading rather than scanning (they don't claim this 
guarantees the text will actually be read).
* Short paragraphs get more attention than long ones.
* Top of page is the best location for nav bars.

This jumped out at me --> "new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more 
accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic 
format. ... information about processes or procedures seemed to be 
comprehended well when presented using animation and text".

Worth a look!

--jk
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   John Kupersmith        jkup at jkup.net        http://www.jkup.net
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   Reference Librarian                 http://www.lib.berkeley.edu
   Doe/Moffitt Libraries
   University of California, Berkeley
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