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- 23 February, 2006 -
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I’ve always been amazed atPoynter’s Eyetrack studies examining what users really spend their time looking at as they visit a web page. I really haven’t spent much time looking atEyetrack III which came in 2004, but even two years later there is a lot of good information to be had. This latest version of their eyetrack student covered homepage design, article-page design, advertising and multimedia.
It seems like eye movement on a news web page is not much different from eye movement on a newspaper layout. Readers tend to focus on the upper left corner first, then move across the page and down. That is based on traditional reading patterns.
The part of the study that I found interesting was the fact that readers focused better on small type. Large type lends itself to scanning a page; small type lends itself to focused reading. In graphic design, we are often taught to avoid small type because it is hard to read. Maybe we should re-train our thinking when we want viewers to read everything on the page (as opposed to scanning a page).