Eyetrack III Research
How do your eyeballs roll?

Content placement and positioning on homepages and other key content pages is one of the challenges of user experience design. Where do people look first on a Web page? What attracts their attention? How do they scan a page? How do they absorb concepts and processes?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute , the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media , and Eyetools. provides some fascinating answers for usability and UXD professionals in this significant study. They observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.

Some key findings:

• Eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right;
• Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page;
• Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning;
• Users often only look at the left one-third of the blurb underneath headlines;
• A headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention;
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best;
• Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones ;
• Ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations ;
• Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.

Read the best of Eyetrack III for more on this research.