The Poynter Institute published a study called EyeTrack III recently. It reveals results of eye movement tracking of a small group of web users. It is a very fascinating read.
The study consisted of studying how 46 people read and scanned 10 mock news websites in a period of an hour.
Some of the findings include the following:
- Users read smaller text and scan larger text
- Right navigation is favoured to left navigation
- The initial focus of most users is in the top left corner of a page
- Shorter paragraphs were most popular
- People scan headlines in less than a second each
- People respond better to text than images
- Ads are largely ignored, but they perform better under the flag and before content
- Text ads received 7 seconds and image ads get 1.6 seconds of viewing
- Images with clear, clean faces attract more views than other images
- People have a habit of clicking on photos
There is a lot more information. I have only spent 30 minutes reading the study so far and have yet to finish the first page.
It is a must read for all website developers.
