Focal Points

A fascinating article today at Pointer.org reporting on a study of users eye movements when visiting news sites. The article shows how people look at pages on news sites, where there attention is drawn, what text they read and what text they skim, and much more.

Since this test was restricted to news sites, which have certain goals and generally follow certain design norms, its clear that the results do not generically apply to all web sites. But certainly many of the points made should be considered for all web sites, and more importantly this type of thinking is a good demonstration of how methodically you should think about what goes where on each page of your web site.

Users browse sites they don't completely consume them. Your web site has to be browsable and usable. This means ruthlessly prioritizing your information, carefully considering where things are positioned on pages, and most importantly testing and tracking your designs to make sure that users are able to accomplish what you (and they) want to - before they give up and just try to find it somewhere else.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at September 8, 2004 3:43 PM