Eye Tracking - Part 1
A boom for designers (and writers)
The age-old saying "It’s all in the eyes" is certainly true in online marketing. Thanks to a team of US researchers, you can pin-point exactly where visitors to your website will look when they hit your homepage.
In other words, you can tailor your content and layout to keep visitors glued to your site!
The researchers, led by new media pioneer Jakob Nielsen, used special eye-tracking technology to see how we scan web pages for information. Testing their subjects’ eye movements across dozens of different templates, they saw a common pattern emerge – a bit like the figure ‘F’.
The ‘F’ Factor
The research shows that your visitor’s eyes will land on the upper left quadrant of the webpage. They hover here for a moment, then scan across to the right before dropping a line or two and repeating the process. After taking in the upper half, their eyes finally drift down to the lower left.
This tells you that your main message should inhabit the upper left hand section, with other priority areas following this ‘F’ pattern across the page. Information in the bottom right hand section will never command much attention, so it’s best reserved for functional and secondary information.
So what goes in the upper left section?
Well our copywriters love this bit! Because numerous eye-tracking studies have concluded that it all comes down to the words. Images are secondary, patiently waiting their turn for the reader’s attention – so while the balance of image and text is vitally important, the visual aspect is there to support the message – not to drown it out.