Eye Tracking Survey

Understanding how the eye reads from a computer display is vitally important to me when planning out your website. Taking care in these seemingly small details helps me to deliver a website that will engage with your visitors and maintain their attention.

If you’ve got a spare 10 minutes check out Eyetrack III who have published some great findings in their latest eye tracking studies of news and multimedia content sites (found via Direct Creative Blog).

I have summarised a few points that grabbed my attention :

• Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page.
• Smaller type encourages focused viewing behaviour… larger type promotes lighter scanning.
• A headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention.
• For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers.
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best.
• Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones.
• We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations.
• Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen.
• Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen.
• The bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.
• Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.

Thanks for reading.