FREE! Eyetracking and the Web

While recently looking over some of the articles in Linda Goin's recent series Web Design Mysteries, I was struck by how much design I just completely overlook when I scan a Web page. Many of her insights, while familiar to a skilled artist like herself were a complete revelation to me. 

Then while I was surfing the Web I came across a reference to eyetracking, sure I've heard of it before, but combined with Linda's articles this prompted me to delve a little deeper and try to find out what eyetracking studies had been done on Web sites and what the implications to Web developers may be. 

Here I aim to share what I've found in my brief investigation – feel free to share any of your insights by adding comments to the bottom of the article.

More Recent Studies

In November 2003, UK based The Usability Company produced an eyetracking report investigating the eye movements of visitors to the sites of three well known UK newspapers (worth checking out the report for some lovely 'gaze trails' showing the eye movements across the pages).

So what did they say? I couldn't resist adding my own commentary of their observations to link in with the above section.

Firstly they reported that people learnt quickly where adverts were placed, and subsequently ignored them (no change there then). Secondly, that viewers expect navigation to be placed on the left and are happier scanning vertically than horizontally (Web literacy?).

They noted advertising placed in the body of the site had a greater chance of being recalled than if it was placed at the sides or top, and that the presence of animated adverts was recalled but not always the content (centre field preference and avoiding the extraneous maybe, peripheral vision will 'force' some degree of viewing of ads placed within the text being read?).

It was observed that viewers' eyes were attracted to images and headlines over block of text, and that by and large a centre-left-right page scanning approach was used. Some minor variations here but pretty much the same.

Interest from the Snake Oil Salesmen

OK, so the title is gratuitously rude, and hypocritical into the bargain given the line of work I'm in, (still it might have got your attention  - make that doubly hypocritical I'm trying to stay away from readability), but for anyone trying to convince advertisers that online advertising really does work, honest, such eye tracking reports are vital.

The Usability Company report, highlighted above, suggests that template driven sites might fall into a trap of allowing the user to avoid 'irrelevant content' if it always appears in the same place. Hence it may be advisable to allow adverts to be positioned at different places on different pages.

The ad industry analyst Ajay Segal noted in 2002 that MSN, Terra Lycos and CNET had all used eyetracking studies to help them improve their ad viewing. One outcome being that Lycos moved their top ad banner below their top horizontal navbar. Apparently this really increased the ads viewing figures. Mind it's not in that position now so that can't be the full story!

Here the issue of viewers quickly being able to ignore undesirable content was highlighted. The solution suggested here is not just to move ad position, but also vary the ad's size and shape.

An Aside I – Child's Play

This article (OK I give up trying to avoid the subject of readability; it contains the longest paragraph I have seen for a long while) refers to an eyetracking study carried out on small children viewing the Teletubbies web site. Apparently small intricate items like faces held the attention better than flashy animation.