What a visitor sees
Posted on Monday, September 11, 2006 at 3:46 PM
Just what does a visitor do when your carefully designed web site first appears before their eyes ? What part of the page do they look at first ? How far down do they scroll before leaving your home page. What are the important areas of your page ? How about the text size ? And what about graphics ?
These and many other questions were used in experiments on web users by Eyetrack and their web site makes very, very interesting reading.
It seems that there are certain patterns which visitors eyes tend to follow when looking at a web page. There are a couple of interesting graphics (reproduced below - click the image to view the original larger version) which show "heat maps" of the most important areas of the page, and the track visitors eyes tend to follow.
One very interesting thing that came out of the research was that smaller text tends to be read more then large text, which tends just to be scanned.
Although the research was carried out a couple of years ago, I think it makes very interesting reading and may provide clues to web masters and bloggers when designing web pages. Do have a look at the site - you can even download a 300 page pdf file of all the results to keep as a reference.
Related to this subject, but on a different web site, there is a posting here which may shed more light on the subject.
Once again the web site is at Eyetrack.
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