Interaction design

Eyetracking software has learned us new rules for the usability of different web pages. The Nielssen Norman Group did extensive testing with eyetracking to see on which parts users focus the most.

In their research they used three different sites; 1 an about us section 2 a product page and 3 a search engine result page. The results show interesting differences between the three different pages.

(red represents the most looked at while gray did not have any fixations)

In general all three pages have an F viewing pattern. The middle result (the product page), shows a different pattern because of the large image. You see also quite a lot of focus to the ‘add to my cart’ and ‘price’ next to the product page. With the search engine result you see that the fixation is wider as the content is also wider. Interesting detail is the attention the ‘adword’ gets all the way to the right.

Lessons learned

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

See also the use it site.