Ever Wondered What Your Users Looked at First?

The Poynter-Stanford study ...

Marion Lewenstein, Professor of Communication, Emerita, at Stanford University, was the principal investigator in the Poynter-Stanford eye-tracking study, which ran for four years and involved 67 subjects - about the same size as the study group in Nielsen's pioneering work. After being hooked up in a contraption that looks suited for space travel, the subjects went online to look at news sites, arguably the most text intensive of all information heavy websites.

The eye movements of the study group were tracked for point and duration of focus, and the measurements were extremely fine.

Text first, then graphics ...

Perhaps the single most important finding of the study surprised even the people running it: the eye goes first to text. Of the first three eye-fixations on a page, only 22% were on graphics; 78% were on text.

In their own words: "more often than not, briefs or captions got the first eye fixations when the first page came up. Then the eyes came back to photos or graphics, sometimes after readers had clicked away to a full article before returning to the first page." The study was done on high-speed university connections using good computers, so the lag between text and image visibility was much less than it is on most dial-up connections, but even after pages were fully loaded:

Of all graphics, aside from banner ads and photos, available to a subject throughout a session, only 22 percent were looked at. Banner ads, which were broken out separately from other graphics, did somewhat better: 45 percent were looked at. And photos did best: 64 percent were looked at. These figures stack up against briefs and articles text, which were looked at 82 and 92 percent of the time, respectively.

In what may be good news for branding through visuals, however, the study did note that images may be peripherally visible even when they are not points of direct fixation

The study also found that the eye goes naturally to the center of the screen, unlike our learned approach to paper.

Interlaced browsing is the norm ...

Just as startling was the finding that subjects did not visit pages or even websites sequentially. Rather, they would open a page, scan it briefly, open additional pages, and then engage in back and forth reading behavior - interlacing information sources throughout their browsing sessions, and almost never reading all of anything.

Nielsen says he noticed this behavior as early as 1994, but it didn't make it into the useability literature in a big way because his studies didn't involve a sufficiently rich hyperspace. The online newspapers used in the Stanford-Poynter study provide a rich hyperspace, but users may seek out alternatives on their own, particularly to explore something they find in their initial browsing session. Also, as the ordinary computer gains power, this kind of resource-gobbling session won't produce the inhibiting negatives that would have been the norm for Nielsen's respondents.

The importance of this cannot be overstated: your site is being viewed in a context you cannot control, and must be able to thrive in real-time association with the competition. The Web is the actual user experience, not the site.

Scrolling is not a problem ...

Finally, in spite of the widely held belief that forcing users to scroll is almost as bad as forcing them to wait, the study found that it just didn't matter if the content was important. In fact, reading behavior was more likely to take place below the first screen than above - meaning that being forced to scroll, once reading started, presented no barrier to continuing on. This does not mean, of course, that scrolling will take place if there is no reason, but it does mean that proper organisation of information can bring readers down below the first screen in a meaningful way. And each screen has an equal chance of introducing new content.

The upshot ...

What these studies mean for text-centric websites runs counter to almost everything in the popular stream of web design thought, but much of what is taking place on major news sites seems to be taking it in. Interlaced browsing, for example, is being recognized by the increased use of "new window" calls for hyperlinks, there is movement away from using images to punctuate content, and many sites are placing key features below the first screen

Also, there is an increasing appreciation of the Nielsen credo that, the attempt to impart credibility by using advanced presentation technology may actually work against the goal of having it read. Sites like the Economist and the Financial Times are paring back on interactive technology and complex menu structures because they tend to increase user problems.

ULTIMATELY ....

It's not just news sites that are taking these lessons to heart, but for them, the lessons are survival critical and what they learn in this struggle to enhance useability can guide all of us in other forms of information-centric design. So have a look at the Economist ... and then have a look at Pizza Hut, Quaker Oats, and the astonishing effort by the Zimbabwe Posts and Telecommunications Corporation.