Eye Tracking Shows We Start At The Top

In a recent article posted at a pay-per-click sales site, they rave about eye tracking and how it’s changed design altogether. Of course, it’s not eye tracking that’s changed design, heat maps and corresponding eye tracking studies and results can help inform a designer or content manager how the public sees their site. It can’t automatically help you with hits and certainly doesn’t make you a better designer from the get go. Any eye tracking study can tell you that a read begins at the top of the page and moves down, but it’s how you use that information that can provide insight into the design and subject matter of a web page.

Since Louis Émile Javal’s initial ventures into eye-tracking and the understanding of fixations and saccades we’ve known that people read differently. Eye tracking studies caused many to begin to question and examine just how people’s eyes scan across a page.

The original article mentions a study released by the Poynter Institute in which a system called Eyetrack III was used to show that website visitors typically look at the upper left part of the page, then across to the right before eventually scrolling down if they’re interested. This result seems pretty obvious even without an eye tracking system, but you’d be surprised how poorly organized some sites are.

The article goes on to mention that text and especially big, bold headlines work better than any graphic, image, multimedia, or video, so if you want to woo your reader you better get writing. Still, sometimes we can’t help but wonder how habits might change as people grow more accustomed to the Internet in general and come to expect moving pictures, sound, video, etc. Will a different, younger generation learn to read differently than those around as the Internet was first making headlines?

Landing Page Optimization: How Eye-Tracking Can Help You Increase Your ROI

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1. Shocking Revelation: Eye Tracking Has Problems
2. Eye Tracking Shows the Importance of Good Copy
3. Eye Tracking and Style Guides
4. Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Part 1
5. Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 2
6. Eye Tracking: Evaluating Landing Page Usability With Surveys
7. Eye Tracking and F Patterns: Recurring Theme in Web Usability
8. Eye Tracking Shows Not All Websites Are Created Equal
9. Framework for Eye Tracking Patterns and Usability Problems: Pt 3
10. Eye Tracking: Readers Run Out of Gas Below the Fold