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."

Comments

Redo

[Apreche]

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

Menu Placement

[waldoj]

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