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Web viewing patterns

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by maryweilage

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This week's Design and Usability Tactics newsletter examines the findings of a study called Eyetrack III, which tracked the eye movements of research subjects browsing mock news Web sites and real multimedia content.

How do the Eyetrack study results compare to your testing and observations of Web visitor viewing patterns? Are the results useful? Do you think the testing methodology used in the Eyetrack study is more or less useful than other forms of user testing?

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by lorrainer

Great article! Thank you for making it easy to read and understand!! The next step should be a larger group of people and more different kinds of web sites. Group them by types, too. That way, if you're designing a health related web site, you can customize it to what people liked about those sites vs what they liked about "fun" sites.

I'd like to see more of these kinds of studies. I'm always fascinated by "what works and why!" Fonts, design, color....

Does anyone have any links to any more website/design-related studies like this? Or any studies on fonts/color?

Thanks!
Lorraine

by bucky kaufman (mcsd)

The Wall Street Journal has done *extensive* research on this kind of stuff - since way before the web.

They publish a "newspaper" that simply shows how they lay out their content, and why. It's about a dozen full-sized newspaper pages, where the content describes why a particular section exists, and how it is formed.

While that is a *print* medium, it is a very revealing body of knowledge for content presentation. It's required reading for many (if not most) Journalism students.

by maxlee7_jedi

I believe any survey of this kind is invaluble as user interaction must be monitored. Users change their habbits but research must be conducted on a larger scale. In order to accurately decide how a users eye moves accross the page, more users must be tested. Also their will be variations accross different nations. ie asian countries will be different to european countries. Keep up the testing as this information is vital to good hci.

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