Eye Tracking the News Industry
Anyone who reads the news regularly knows that the journalism industry is in the midst of an epic change. Some might say it’s in dire straits, but where there’s trouble, innovators often see opportunity. In recent posts, Eye Tracking Update has focused on tips learned from eye tracking studies that enable designers to make their websites more effective or useful for the viewer. A study we came across lays out tactics for the news industry also derived from eye tracking studies.
The study, published by the Poynter Institute and the Eslow Center for Journalism and New Media, used an Eyetools eye tracking system to research how viewers read news websites and real multimedia content.
Using an eye tracker, researchers observed 46 people over the course of an hour, following their eyes through mock news websites and various multimedia.They found that eyes most often fixated in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area for a while before moving towards the left or right. After time, viewers began to venture away from the top portion and eventually downward through the rest of the page. Their findings were consistent but not final, as movement did vary depending on the layout of what was shown.
They found that dominant headlines, as you might expect, most often beckon the eyes before anything else on the page, photography and images included. This actually reveals the opposite results of another Poynter study from 1990, which said that viewers see photos and artwork first. When it comes to the computer screen, text dominates.
Most news websites observed were fairly consistent in putting the dominant homepage image in the upper left, and participants were observed as having first looked at the flag or logo and top headlines in the upper left corner.
The eye tracking results also showed that smaller type actually encourages focused viewing behavior, while larger type promotes lighter scanning. Participants spent more time on smaller type, and when larger fonts were present on the page, there were fewer words fixated on overall. As a layout designer, you could use this information both ways – to encourage people to move around your page and see the entire layout, while still getting them to focus on certain information. Again, it all depends on layout.
When it comes to images, eye tracking showed that larger images tend to hold the eye longer than smaller ones. A lot of news homepages typically use templates that employ a predetermined size for the main image. Therefore, the template layout will often determine the size of the image, and depending on how you want viewers to behave, size should be well considered.
Overall, eye tracking studies continue to show that layout definitely dictates viewers’ behavior while browsing the web. Decisions shouldn’t be arbitrary when it comes to what to put where and how big. Each slight change can effect a pair of eyes greatly, and then a viewer’s resulting behavior, making the difference between a good website and a great one.
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