Eyetracking and effective online design
I came across this article a bit ago about how Jakob Nielsen did a study on the usability of news pages. Participants in the study were given tasks and he used eye tracking technology to watch what areas of the pages they looked at. There were two designs to the various pages and you can see the heat maps that show what people were looking at most on each page.
There’s a lot to really like about this article and some interesting facts. One of the more obvious conclusions is that people like bullet points. Also, a quick summary under a title is extremely helpful. The heat maps are really interesting, better design with white space and fewer images had people spending less time on the page but increased their comprehension of the information. This is good on so many levels, if you believe that people spend only so much time reading the web, increasing the pace at which they do that means they can view more at any given time.
Also the organization of the pages is very imortant. Giving sections useful titles like “News Releases” draws people’s eyes in. Basically, a lot of attention needs to be given to every aspect of the site. Just like in well edited content, things shouldn’t be added purely for decorative reasons. Images should be relevant to the content they are showing. Headlines or sub-headlines need to tell the user what they are getting in to.
However there’s one strange point made in the article. I’m sure they put it in because it’s just so strange - it has nothing to do with design, but they show two heatmaps of a baseball player, one with women looking and one with men. Check it out:
Which they follow with this priceless quote:
Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
Good times. Anyhow, while the article talks specifically about news sites, I suspect that almost all of the suggestions can be applied across most websites. It does a great job of underscoring the importance of good layout and design.
