People don't read!

 posted Friday, July 07, 2006 at 5:35 pm MST

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from "Eyetracking and Images of People":

"Visitors tend not to look at big, block images, so don't put interactive elements, such as navigation in these images.

People don't look intensely at images, but seem to use images as 'anchors,' which act as starting points for a scanning pattern.

Images of people draw attention more than images. The more personal the image, the more powerful. Photos of employees do better than spokesmodel types. Sometimes, however, human images can distract from more important page elements, so testing is important."

And in "Eye tracking Web usability" (which reports Jakob Nielsen's eye-tracking study) Nielsen is quoted (in part) with this:

"The real highlight [of the study] is that peoples' eyes flitter fast across pages. Very little time is allocated to each page element, so you have to be brief and concise in communicating online," Nielsen said. "They don't look in on, across the lines of a page, and often fixate on something, such as the first few words of a headline, for only a tenth of second. The right-hand side is often never in view of the eyes. People look down the pages in an 'F' pattern [see example on the left], with a few stripes at top–the first one longer than the second–and then down the long vertical stripe to see if is any else. Sometime the track turns into an 'E' pattern but it's usually an F."

Gotta work with it ... cognitive ergonomics ... no court of appeal here!

*thanks to Michael Surtees' ''Web Eyetracking'' for the brick upside the head.*

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