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The Stanford Poynter Project Study
sredding writes: "The Stanford Poynter Project has some interesting conclusions after a study of Internet news readers. 'Two years ago Stanford University and The Poynter Institute researchers began collaborating to learn how frequent Internet news readers went about perusing news online.' It's an interesting read for Web designers." Cool info and interesting statistics, especially the one about how people jump for text first, not pictures. Take that, Mosaic! Lynx forever! ;)
I would just like to note that Lynx was made (or at least started) by people at Kansas University. When alot of people think of Kansas they assume that everyone is a farmer and that everyone lives in a small town which is not necessarily true. With a little plug for Lynx from slashdot, I wanted to make sure I acknowledged that not all computer innovation has to come from crowded cities and long commutes.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
err, no, slashdot works great under lynx. it actually shows the page (the text) as it loads, unlike netscape, which waits until all the 's have been closed. I read /. everyday under lynx, and find it extremely clunky whenever I look at it with Netscape. In fact, I find lynx great for reading news sites, where (as the article says) you go for the text anyway. on overdesigned commercial sites, you usually get 3 or 4 screenfuls of crap at the top (for things like left navigation on graphical browsers), but you learn to skip them *really* quickly, and you don't even give them a bit of attention. lynx is a great timesaver; I'd consider switching over to links (the newer text-mode browser) only if it implemented a lynx-like mode which flattens tables.
Have you browsed slashdot in Lynx? It is terrible. Perhaps some effort could made for a more lynx-friendly slashdot? :)
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
No, you're not. I read the word "news" and immediately thought usenet.
The internet was so much nicer when the general population wasn't on it.
I couldn't agree more. I used to long for the day when everyone would be online. It was a very civilised place to be, and a nice way to communicate with others. Well, now they're all here, and I wish they weren't. The unwashed masses have changed the character of the net. It's not the same place it used to be :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You must be the first person I have _ever_ encountered that reads Playboy for news.
Donny
This is a DoS attack. Sue him.
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
OK, here's the Poynter Institute bolting a metal frame onto a browser-user's head and monitoring his every eye motion. Don't you suppose that all that intensive surveillance might just possibly have some small effect on the user's behavior? Like, all alone, without the head gear, what could be more natural than if he might have headed on over to playboy.com to spend a few minutes or even hours grazing among the bitmaps and multimedia.
Now imagine that this same browsing subject has a birdcage studded with electronic doodads bolted around his skull, and a variety of all-too-serious sociologists peering over his shoulder. I'd guess that under those circumstances our lab rat will spend a good deal more time perusing something serious and scholarly like that lighthouse for the investment class the New York Times, or even our own grave and stately slashdot.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Something I've always wondered about, which this doesn't seem to cover, is does the general population use multiple browser windows and move back and forth between them like I imagine most of us do? I've had a LOT of non-techie people ask me how I made a new window when they see me browsing. I guess it's not that easy to figure out on your own (sure seems like it, though). This seems like a pretty relevant browsing-habit question; any guesses?
Doesn't matter. Load a page with images, and before it starts displaying, go make a cup of coffee. Come back, and watch your eyes absorb all the header text first, long before you care about most pictures. (Exception: pr0n will probably catch your eye faster, because that's a reproductive advantage. Or, would be if you were really seeing potential mates.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
According to this page not one person in this study ever looked slashdot, but SOMEONE looked at PostalNews.com 9 times.
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RumorsDaily
You know... for a sight claiming that the eye jumps for text first they have an awefully big
picture with an awfully small sidebar of text.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Ha!! I told you so. I go to read the articles at playboy.com, not look at the pictures :)
The Poynter Eyetrack study was discussed, with interesting commentary, in May 14 edition of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.
If you want to skip the huge image and read the article in a larger frame, use this link.
Enjoy life, drink beer.
A way to get more specific answers than one can from videotaping is to track eye movements. So we began another study. This one used eyetracking equipment that recorded where the eyes stopped to absorb information. That tells us what our subjects read. We also could track movement from site to site.
News watching log digest for user B1FF:
TEXT: In this latest issue of Sports Illustrated, we have Natalie Portman modeling the latest bikinis, and
Follows link, eyes hover over pictures for 100 minutes.
TEXT: In today's 1M A K001 D00D cooking section, a new recipe for hot grits!
Follows link, eyes follow text at rate of 2 words a minute.
TEXT: H0W T0 B3 AN 3133T HAX0R revals the pros secrets on how to turn your computer on!
Follows link, computer powered off 30 seconds after eyes are on main article page.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Lots of money wasted here. Everyone has experienced net lag and knows intuitively that pictures take a long time to load. So we have gotten used to looking for the text first, then looking at the pictures that may actually be loaded by then. If everyone would just use the ALT tags like they're supposed to, I wouldn't ever look at pictures.
Oh well, why can't they waste money in my direction? =-p
Yes, content is king. Content in the sense of *usable information*. But also keep in mind that people love to get things presented in an attractive way. And that also includes graphics. :-)
This said, the study doesn't really make a point against embedding text in a graphical environment. No matter where people look first, the overall impression of a page has a huge influence on wether people come back or not. And the "commercial web" is all about making people come back. That for sure doesn't excuse these glossy macromedia flash company presentation websites that take longer to load than anyone would be ready to wait - but I support a sensible use of graphic elements on websites. Btw...anyone working on a text-only version of "userfriendly"? With ASCII graphics?
Am I the only one that thought of usenet when reading this? Have people totally given up on usenet? I remember the first time that someone sent SPAM to every newsgroup. His ISP was DoSed with all of the replies complaining. The internet was so much nicer when the general population wasn't on it.
How to 'peruse news online' has become an art of dodging spam and looking for uuencoded binaries. -sigh-
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The problem with w3m is that it has to load the page fully in order to know how to render it. Somewhat like Netscape. You buy some time by skipping graphics, but lose otherwise. I think you're stuck.
Mozilla (and IE 5.x) both render and redraw on the fly. This makes for much faster percieved page loads and redraws (say if you resize a window). If the console-mode browsers could emulate this behavior, things might be cool, but I'm not sure how 'zactly you'd go about doing that.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
The other value of multiple windows is that you can choose different display settings for, say, full page vs. a thread.
For full page, I tend to set threshold at 2 (or 3, if things are really bad), mode to threaded, highest moderated and most recent first. For a thread, I prefer threshold=0 (filter nothing but trolls), and mode to nested. I do this by hand-editing the URL (eg: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/07/04/04302 49&mode=nested&threshold=0&cid=46), and changing the cid to view different threads.
It would be kinda nice to be able to set seperate front page and thread view modes ;-)
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Where do eyes go initially after firing up the first screenful of online news? To text, most likely. Not to photos or graphics, as you might expect. Instead, briefs or captions get eye fixations first, by and large. The eyes of online news readers then come back to the photos and graphics, sometimes not until they have returned to the first page after clicking away to a full article.
News flash! When people read news, they actualy do read!
Wow. Who'da thunk, huh?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I noticed that the size of the study was small, only 67 people, and 40ish hours of gathered info. To me this means the results and reality may vary wildly. Also they don't say how they selected their study group.
The content loads first, and its unusual positioning grabs your eye. I read a paragraph or two, until I headed to the innocuous grey caption -- before I noticed the picture with the cyborg style eye tracker. The TOC doesn't load until clicked, presumably to lead you into the introduction without distractions. Oh, there was a logo up in the corner.
While their results were about news sites, the principles are pretty well demonstrated on there site. Like the site or not, it seems to re-enforce their findings (coincidence? I think not.)
Of course, given a particular browser choice, bandwith, and individual makeup, YMMV.
zaugg