heisel.org

I’ve got my eye on this

Friday | March 26, 2004 | 1:07 pm  

There are some early, and inter­est­ing results from Poynter’s latest eye­track­ing study. (Hat tip to Jay).

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Users really like text — photos, mul­ti­me­dia ele­ments and the like got lower view­ing than text and text-​links

• Users paid little atten­tion to the blurbs beneath head­line links and paid more atten­tion to the headline-​link itself. The author says this could mean head­lines are even more impor­tant than we thought… they’re the pri­mary way to convey infor­ma­tion to readers.

• Users will scroll below the “fold” — as the long as the design doesn’t explic­ity cut the page in half… he said that when pages had rules or other items to dis­tin­guish “above the fold” from “below the fold” users tended to think the page ended and didn’t scroll. If the layout indi­cated more con­tent, then they’d scroll.

• Ads on shorter, less packed home pages tended to receive more view­er­ship than on more content-​packed home pages

  I wonder if this isn’t just because the user is left look­ing for infor­ma­tion that isn’t on your page, so they turn to the ads as a last resort.

• Mul­ti­me­dia ele­ments didn’t get more hits than text… words reign supreme.

These are all very inter­est­ing results, but its also stuff that folks in the know have been saying and read­ing for a while.

I’m inter­ested in seeing the full results, which will be posted start­ing April 5 I don’t know where I pulled that date out from… the site says start­ing in May.

We cer­tainly can’t draw any hard and fast con­clus­tions yet, but I imag­ine these early results indi­cate trends, and I hope the news indus­try — which used eye­track­ing in the ’70s to usher in better design — will take the report to heart and start improv­ing their sites.

I, for one, will try and do my part.

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