Mar
9
Studies of Eye Movements on Web Pages
Filed Under Web Design
There’s a discussion at Search Engine Watch forums about a presentation on the eye movement patterns and “hot spots” of surfers at search engines, as presented at SES last month
While that’s geared to looking at visitors to search engines, there are other studies and papers that delve into user behavior and eye patterns on web pages themselves. This one from Poynter Extra is looking at behavior in viewing homepages:
The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
This page at ACM has links to some valuable information resources:
It’s a fascinating concept, and kind of dispels some well-ingrained notions on how best to lay out web pages when building websites. It will be interesting to try to adapt some of the findings to see how page placement can affect conversion and clickthroughs on pages.