OTHER ARTICLES

Scott Rayden, iSearch Media


Website designers have been struggling for years with questions like: Is my homepage layout effective? ... What effect do testimonial blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? ... When is multimedia appropriate? ... Are the ads on my site placed where they'll be seen most by visitors?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools may help shed some light on those questions and more. Eyetracking research like this won't provide the end-all-be-all answer here, but combined with other site metrics already used by sophisticated website managers - usability testing, focus groups, and log analysis, to give a few examples - the Eyetrack III findings could provide some further direction for improving website layout.

Eyetrack III observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock websites and real multimedia content. In this article I'll provide an overview of their reportings.

  At the core: Homepage Layout

While testing participants' eye movements across several home page designs, Eyetrack III researchers noticed a common pattern: A website visitor's eyes most often fixate first on the upper left corner of the page, hovering in that area for a few seconds, then scanning from the left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for several seconds does a visitor's eyes wander down the page.



Depending on page layout, of course, this pattern can vary a great deal. The image above is a simplistic representation of the most common eye-movement pattern the researchers noted when testing the visual behavior of visitors to many different homepages of many different design schemes.

  Want people to read, not scan? Consider small type

The Eyetrack III researchers discovered something significant when testing headline and type size on home pages: Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior, while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, the testers found that people tend to focus a lot more when visiting web pages featuring small font than they do when the text on a page is larger. Larger font results in rampant scanning: visitors fixate on fewer words overall, and instead jump visually all around the page, looking for words or phrases that capture their attention.

Something to consider when drawing up plans for your own new website.