Executive Summary
We all know that web users are time poor and fickle when it comes to visiting sites on the web. We are constantly bombarded by advertising and promotions in all their forms. However, some of these advertisements we attend to while others we don't. Why is that?
The web has been with us for a number of years but up to now there have been very few rules to help designers design sites that support the way we, as consumers, want to use them. Where should design elements - logos, search, and advertisements - appear on a site?
The Usability Company and Eyetracker recently conducted an eyetracking study to determine where people look on a page when they visit a web site. They studied eye movements of people using three well-known newspaper sites - The Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times.
Eyetracking offers information that cannot possibly be obtained by traditional usability testing and market research methodologies. The human brain processes visual information very quickly. When looking at a web page we make subconscious decisions as to the importance of the information viewed within microseconds. If an advert is perceived to be sufficiently interesting then fixations are considerably longer.
Participants in the research were asked to complete a number of very simple tasks on the three sites. These tasks were typical of the kinds of things people would be doing in the real world. For example, the first task they were asked to complete was 'Please go to the Business section of the site'. The order of the sites was rotated to minimise any learning effects.
While using the sites peoples' eye movements were recorded and they were questioned about their impressions of the sites. Each participant completed a questionnaire to determine if they could recall the advertisements on each site.
Key findings
The research has offered some very interesting findings:
People learned very quickly where advertisements were likely to appear on a site and subsequently ignored those areas of the page when browsing. For example, while people viewed the adverts on the right hand side of the Guardian home page they rarely, if ever, looked to the right hand side of subsequent pages on the Guardian site - they had 'learned' that this area was reserved for advertising and therefore not of interest to them. Likewise having seen the banner ad at the top of The Times homepage very few people looked at the banner ad on other pages of the site.
This finding has, of course, repercussions for all those sites that have a template design where advertisements will always be presented in the same position. It would certainly be more effective to alter the positioning of advertising from page to page (or at least section to section) of a site.
When asked to go to one of the main sections of the sites (i.e. business section) participants found the section much faster on The Times and The FT sites compared to the Guardian site. The reasons are twofold: people have learned that a site's main navigation resides more often than not on the left hand side of the page (when asked to find the sites' main sections peoples' eyes went directly to the left hand side of the page) people find it much easier to scan information vertically than horizontally
Advertising positioned within the body of the site has a far greater probability of being recalled than advertising located in the 'traditional' areas for advertising -at the top of the page and to the right hand side.
Not surprisingly people's eyes were drawn to images and to headlines. However, peoples eyes were much more likely to fixate on a line of text rather than a block. This is consistent with the finding in many usability studies that people are reluctant to read online - preferring to scan instead.
People could recall the presence of animated advertising on sites much more than static advertising but the recall of the content of animated advertising was not any better than static advertisements.
While there were variations in the eye movements of people from site to site and even from page to page within each site the following pattern consistently emerged: It appears that people look to the middle of a page initially then towards the area usually inhabited by the logo of the site, followed by the left hand side (where they expect to find the main navigation) before scanning the areas to the right of the page.
The findings have repercussions for site owners. Web site design should be considered less of an art and more of a science with a better understanding of how people view sites driving the design agenda.
Notes:
- The full version of the report, which includes illustrations and data analysis, is available for download in the Resources section of The Usability Company's website.
- You may also email and request a Word version of the report.
- The Eyetracking report has generated much press interest and coverage. To read some of the coverage so far, please go to our press coverage section.
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