Slashdot Mirror
Eye-tracking Study Shows How Users Scan Web Pages
apatrick writes "An article in UsabilityNews.com
describes an experiment where Internet users' eyes were tracked while they searched for information on WWW pages from three well-known newspapers. The findings indicated that people learn very quickly where ads are usually placed on web pages, and then they no longer look there. The results also show that users look to the left hand side for navigation menus, and they scan from the middle of the page outward. Such results may be useful for developers wanting to make their pages more usable, or to attract the users' attention."
So that's why the big box is placed annoyingly and unavoidably right under the story post here at Slashdot.
BTW, I predict that widespread uptake of DVRs and the ability to fast forward through commercials will cause similar Innovations to occur.
Newscrawl style advertisements are coming.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I am not trolling here.
Most webpages all have a very similar layout so it just makes sense to begin looking for navigation bars on the left hand side. Why would you start elsewhere? Also most of the 'meat' of a page is in the middle, ie. ads are usually pushed off to the sides, so as far as starting from the middle goes, it just makes sense. People didn't come to see ads, they came to see content.
I would love to see the study redone comparing users of say IE and Firebird. I think that users like myself who don't see any ads on websites could potentially have different reading patters. I often find myself looking in the top left or center of pages first to look for new headlines and to verify which site I am at. Of course that's when I'm conciously thinking about it and is not empirical data.
I'm also worried that studies like this may be used to put advertising in different more annoying places in more annoying ways making it harder to block and ignore.
And if you are wondering how to remove all ads in firebird check this out
http://www.texturizer.net/firebird/adblock.html
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I was going to post a insightful reply, but got distracted by cool flashing ThinkGeek adverts. Ooooh, shiny!!!!
Seriously though, I was a bit nonplussed to be spoken to by Michael Jordan the other day whilst browsing the Yahoo site. Turns out it was a Flash banner ad for an underwear company, for which the purported greatest basketball player of all time was hawking. Yes, it caused me to glance up, but then it also caused the following sequence: a scowl, an epithet, an immediate drop in my opinion of MJ and the product, and a drop in the likelihood I will either buy the product or use Yahoo as a resource.
My fear is that as broadband becomes more commonplace, it's not going to mean faster browsing for everybody, it's going to be mean actual commercials on the web. To quote Snoopy: "Blech!"
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
The information regarding menu placement is very interesting. As a developer, I've long been torn over the side on which the menu should go. UI testing on some of my client's sites has shown that people are more likely to look on the left-hand side,but I've also seen credible studies that keeping the menu on the right-hand side (near the scroll bar) is preferable, because it puts the menu near where the mouse will already be.
Now that a proper study has been done on the topic, I imagine that I should start moving menus over to the left-hand side of the page. It might be less efficient, but even crappy standards are still standards.
-Waldo Jaquith
While not entirely on-topic, I use this little tidbit to disable flash while I am surfing, only flipping it back on when I absolutely need to (like for watching the latest Strong Bad Email)
0 0}
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-4445535400
Disable Flash:
"Compatibility Flags" = 0x400
Enable:
"Compatibility Flags" = 0x0
Enjoy your somewhat more advertising free world.
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Act now, and receive free the Force-Ad server-side enhancement (patent pending). With Force-Ad, you can replace the entirety of your content with Ads, thus further ensuring that noone who looks at your website will receive any useful information in a timely manner or easy-to-use way, all from the server side that is under _your_ control!
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Web Design Best Practices, was a research project to see where the majority of sites place their links, shopping carts, global navigation, search boxes, etc. Unfortunately, the site seems to have disappeared, so the link is Google cache.
Here's the surviving mirror in Russian with links to the resources in English if you scroll down.
Such results may be useful for developers wanting to make their pages more usable
I would imagine this story will have little interest or impact here. I mean, next thing you know we'll start having stories on how to make your pages standards compliant!
Only time I ever use the scroll bar is if I know the approximate location of what I'm lookin for on the page, and even then it's easier (in firebird) to just start typing and find-as-you-type picks up on it. (Note that it's better if you disable the option that only does find-as-you-type for links)
The results simply confirm that users have caught on to the basic layout of most web sites, rather than giving insight into the basic instincts of users. Big whoop.
Similar studies about printed media have shown that page-scans for right-left readers are almost mirrored from those of left-right readers. Since most web pages follow the top/left nav/margin rule, I'm curious how this affects readers who spend the rest of their time reading right-to-left (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.).
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Although, banner ads appear on the top and bottom of print versions as well, at least they aren't in the middle.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
I was on a useability mailing list for awhile, and one of the curious tidbits that came out in research was that scrollbars themselves would have been better suited to the LEFT side of the screen.
Think about it -- most text is left justified; titles and headings start at the left (we read left-to-right, after all)... there's just more data over there if you're skimming. Technically, it would make more sense to have the navigation over there too... but again we're stuck with a standard that can't be changed now without a lot of pain.
Regarding your actual post... It think you have no idea how many users do not have scroll wheels, or don't use them. Sure, most people you know don't use their scrollbars, but believe me, the unwashed masses are using them all the time.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
How can they call that "usability" news? /. editor said, this info can "may be useful for developers wanting to make their pages more usable" but that sure isn't the point of the article.
Sure, like the
Usability is about helping the user make USE of the website, isn't it? Well, it seems those pesky users are getting too smart for their own good (somehow they're jumping directly to the useful parts!) -- quick, let's figure out how to stop this nonsense!
Seriously, I know that online advertising plays an important role in funding freely available sites. But on a website that's purportedly all about usability, it blows my mind that they don't even mention the negative impact that an advertising method that *really* catches the users' eyes will have. Those ads are *detracting* from the usefulness of the site; the slashdot ad box right under the story is a little annoying, because you have to scroll past it to get to what you want (the fr0st p1st, of course). Designers need to keep the balance in mind (and it shouldn't be left out of the discussion).
Personally, when I have to use IE for some reason, I suddenly remember what it's like using the an internet saturated in popup windows and manically-flashing ads... and I can't get through it. I can't concentrate enough to read an article when there's something that simply won't stop flashing right in the middle of the text.
Sure it gets my attention. My eyes can't stop jumping back to that flashing thing. Sometimes I even go to the advertised website, and submit their domain registrant's info into all available forms. Funny, that probably shows up on their statistics as another big win.
Google's text links are okay (which is a good thing, since Mozilla won't block those for me!) -- I'll even click one if it looks relevant. That's the future of web advertising, I think.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Buy a pill. Pay more for ads and promotion than for the research and production. Can't you imagine a better way to know about a pill when you need one than being hammered with ads everywhere you look?
What about Googling for what you need? Is the era of pull-marketing going to replace pushers?
Why should I pay for all the BS and TV shows that have nothing to do with eating breakfast, when all I want is a decent product at decent cost? All that stuff is a privatized sales tax on my consumption, and IMO it's not being spent very well.
Oh well.
Most of it is checking what's obvious at the time, to make sure it's true, and find out the details.
But don't forget most of the sites we visit everyday have business models more or less dependent on the income made from those ads...
So if we all manage to block ads, the interesting sites we access everyday may soon be gone...
C'est a dire, let's make the technology available but difficult enough to install so that only us geeks can surf add-free... hehe...
just kidding... but keep in mind that many many sites wouldn't be there if nobody saw their ads...
just my $0.02...
I am using privoxy for quite a while now. It gets rid of almost anything. And if some annoyance gets past it, you can modify the filters it applies or even write a new one. (Heavy regex hackery, so beware!)
Way back in the day of the original Prodigy videotext service, the bottom quarter of each page was an ad. It was well known that Prodigy users (including me) trained themselves unconsciously to blank that part of the screen from their minds. The rest just sums up what we have always known. People generally don't read Web pages; they scan.
The fact that they ignore ads is likely not web page specific - it is likely just human nature. Things that we see all of the time, we stop registering when we take in a scene and we assume they are there. It is just an economy thing - the same reason learning to drive a car is confusing and complicated at first, and over time it is no big deal to take your eyes off of things briefly.
It is very likely that I don't scan the slashdot logo anymore or the icons at the top either.
The left to right scanning is likely a factor of 1) the way the web page is designed in the first place - which is leads to 2) the language that the page is written in.
English is a left to right language, so we are used to that. Right to left languages likely won't scan a page like that at first - but if the page is designed that way, they will likely adjust.
This study would have been far more impressive if they did it with randomly designed pages. Don't let them out on the web, instead have a shape and text generator that with each load mixes up the design structure so that it isn't that they are reading based on its structure, but based on some innate reading style.
Again, it will change with languages/cultures which will be more dramatic with geographic changes as well (but not universal).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
it's interesting, but why did they take only three newspaper sites as their source? Wouldn't that skew the sample towards daily readers?
in a word, no
pull-marketing is more efficient, and user-centric, so the push-marketers will be more and more aggressive, so they don't lose their business model, in five years, they'll be the next RIAA.
--
In North America, your Business Model chooses you, and won't ever let go.
I live in a giant bucket.
My spoon is too big.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
WebCriteria (now defunct, bought by another company,) did research on this along with Reed College back in 1999-2000. We had a much larger sample than three daily newspaper websites, and used all sorts of fancy tech to do it. (Cameras linked to computers doing eye-tracking, combined with screen capturing, to match exactly what they were looking at. They were allowed to surf whatever websites they wanted, but we tried to keep them viewing 'commercial' websites.)
We used this data to write a program that would analyze websites using this data. (So a website that had lots of side menus would be ranked lower, because people tended not to look at side menus that were too long.) Great idea, had lots of big-name customers (Intel, IBM, Microsoft, GM...) but in the end, trying to add extra services killed the company.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
now that JenniCam's offline, i wanna see a study where internet users hands are tracked while they 'search' for 'information' on web pages.
haha yeah, the segue was weak, but i hadta throw in the obligatory mastubatory joke
It would be very interesting to see the results of an eye tracking study on goatse.
Wilt was better.
The only underwear product I've seen NBA player Michael Jordan endorse on TV is Hanes underwear.