image by s-revenge
If you’ve got a spare 10 minutes today check out Eyetrack III who have published some great findings in their latest eye tracking studies of news and multimedia content sites (found via Direct Creative Blog).
There’s loads of juicy goodness in the full article but here are 11 of the main points that grabbed my attention:
- “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page”
- “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior…. larger type promotes lighter scanning”
- “a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention”
- “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
- “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
- “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones.”
- “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations”
- “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen”
- “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen”
- “the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.”
- “Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages”
This study is five years old. Some results are still likely to be relevant, but do exercise caution as behaviours may have changed and the accuracy of eyetracking equipment is certainly known to have improved over the past five years.
nice findings really liked them much :)
these are great findings. I have to find a way now to implement them into my website
That picture kinda creeps me out, but the information is very interesting!!
So a Picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures of faces. Thank you for the list, I find it very interesting.
Nick
I love lists. This is one of my favorite. Like the top of this photo shows I think large eyes are what we naturally seek to see.
Samm
#5:“Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best” It is great… I’ll do it. Thanks
:D
Some of the stuff was cool. But, I think the thing that made this study so popular was because everyone could relate with it. Many of these things were obvious such as: “Smaller text encourages more focused reading”. However, it is fun to see that someone was finally able to produce some quality content out of common knolwedge =)