I was doing my daily blog hopping when I found this really interesting article from Problogger. He talks about a recent study published that basically shows where the human eye goes and stays in websites. This is a good resource material for bloggers, marketers, and web developers because it gives you tips on how to optimize your site design so that you can really put the best content in the proper place. More details on this after the break.
Problogger shares 11 Striking Findings from the study:
1. “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page”
2. “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior…. larger type promotes lighter scanning”
3. “a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention”
4. “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
5. “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
6. “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones.”
7. “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations”
8. “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen”
9. “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen”
10. “the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.”
11. “Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages”
After reading this, it makes me want to get a complete redesign for all my blogs. Argh. Haha.
Thanks for the info. Very useful to us web developers!!
You can also install a heat map wordpress plugin so you can monitor the behavior of your blog readers. It is not the same type of heat map that google uses. The plugin just offers a simple view of users’ clicks.