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What Are They Looking At?

By Bud Kraus
bud@joyofcode.com
Joy Of Code
Creator And Instructor

v3 i20
Originally Published: November 29, 2007

A web page is a most brutal place.

If you think that users of your site are delighted to spend lots of time happily reading any of your web pages, then you couldn't be farther from the truth.

So here is the truth.  The average web visitor gives you about .5 sec max to make a compelling case to stick around and read on.  A half a second.  All that work to make your pitch and in the blink of an eye, all too often, your visitor , is gone.

That is about as cruel as it gets.

I'm totally absorbed by what people look at on web pages and for how long.  I'm not just interested in what they see, but also the order (pattern) in which they view the elements of a page,

I realize that people don't read web pages - they scan them.  Hence, we get a web that's filled with headlines, blurbs, and bullets.  Paragraphs are becoming relics from a different age.

Dig a little deeper. Get beyond the simple truths and myths of what people see when looking at a web page and you'll find out some very interesting things.  A study was done by Eyetrack III for the Poynter Institute which observed people looking at newspaper web sites. Of course, newspaper web sites are just a sliver of the web, but what was learned illustrates some broader points of how people look at web pages.

How does Eyetrack III measure how  people look at web pages?  Various eyeball tracking technologies exist that follow how long one fixates at a given point on a page and how long it takes to move to the next point.  Each fixation point, brief as it may be, is mapped along with the eye paths taken to move to the next fixation point. By doing this a pattern is developed showing what the user sees, how long she  sees it and in what order page elements are seen.

Pretty amazing, huh? (Eye tracking technology has been around in print and advertising for some time, so this idea is not new.)

I had a lot of questions about this, so I read over Eyetrack III's Frequently Asked Questions.

At the risk of over simplification, here's what I learned from the study "The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes."

What's in quotations are my wholesale, cherry-picked findings lifted from the study's report.

  • "The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time, did their eyes explore farther down the page."
  • "Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page -- especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right."
  • To get people to read and not scan pages, use smaller type face. "Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning."
  • "For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes." Most people only see the left side of the headline (first word or two) before moving on.

I I encourage you to read the study even if you're not in the newspaper business because many lessons learned can be applied to most sites.