The Eyes Have It

So, you want to create an effective website or blog. Do you know where to put the most critical data? How to design the page to optimize usability? You should know what eye tracking tells us.

Using a combination of complex hardware and data analysis, eye tracking maps a tester’s eye movements across a computer screen and assesses the amount of mental strain exerted at any given moment. It does this by recording scanning patterns of the eye, measuring pupil dilation (which correlates to cognitive effort) and taking over 250 observations of each eye per second.

• A minuscule percentage of the subjects scrolled down to see what was being offered below the browser’s bottom border. Clearly, home pages are viewed as portals to get where the visitor wants to go…not lengthy destination pages.
• Web visitors look to the upper middle of the home page first. Putting your navigation tools there allow them to get where they want to go fast. Over 20% of their attention was focused here.
• Text heavy sites are more difficult to use. Most visitors only read the first two lines before moving on unless there’s white space and eye rests.
• Clean, non-cluttered sites produced higher success rates. Users didn’t have to filter through as much unnecessary information.
• Buttons/Icons with 1-3 word descriptions got the most use. Wordy button labels got the least.
• Banner ads, on average, earned about 13% of the viewer’s time and interest.

Before you design your web page…keep in mind that just like any other visual medium, you have to have a flow pattern for your viewer’s eyes to follow. Don’t make them work to get the message.