Eyetrack III User Behaviour Results

The Eyetrack III appears to be a device that follows people's eyes as they look at things... What's this used for? Helicopters? Fighter pilots? Observing people as they look at websites? Yeah, the last one.

46 people were observed for an hour while they looked through 'mock news websites and real multimedia content'. The findings are, apparently, not intended as a definitive exploration of user behaviour but they definitely offer an insight into people's use of websites.

So first up, users scan the top portion of a page starting with the top left and then move right. The the eye looks for the dominant headline text (generally ignoring images), with priority given to the top left of the screen.

The most interesting thing for me is the text size findings. Apparently people tend to scan large type but read small type. If you want someone to focus on a portion of your information set it small. Having said that, if the blurbs accompanying a headline are smaller than the headline text then they get ignored.

On the subject of blurbs, it appears that website blurbs only have a few words to grab the user. Eyetrack found that people will generally only read a couple of words before deciding whether they're interested. Man, we're an impatient bunch aren't we?! On top of that headlines only get a second of attention before being passed over so the first few words have to be 'attention-grabbers'.

Interestingly, it was also found that people are quite happy to read below the fold. The eyes go in search of an interesting headline or keyword, again suggesting that you invest in some good copy.

On the navigation front, top-placing garnered the most attention, getting a good portion of time spent on it. Surprisingly, the next best spot for navigation appears to be the right hand side of the page.

Based on this stuff the Eyetrack folk have broken down the home page designs of the sites they tested on along with statistics for each so you can make you own mind up about what you prefer.

For body copy the findings suggest using short line lengths with single column text. Text gets attention before photos and summaries leading into articles appear very popular. Oddly, paragraphs containing a portion of bold text got the attention of 95% of people tested.

That's everything that grabbed me but I highly recommend reading the whole article. I haven't seen a study like this in a while and the findings are facinating...

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