• by Christopher M. Schroeder , September 10, 2004

The Web is such an imminently measurable medium; sometimes we don't stop long enough to ask ourselves: Are the numbers telling us the whole story? This has been particularly true, I think, when content providers, advertisers, and designers debate what the most effective ways are to drive deeper, richer, and longer audience engagement.

My friend Steve Outing, as thoughtful a commentator on what works in Web experience as there is, and his colleague Laura Ruel just published a fascinating new study for The Poytner Institute, the Estlow Center for Jounalism and New Media, and Eyetools. (full report is found at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/). Having observed 46 people each for one hour as their eyes followed mock news Web sites and real multimedia content, Steve and Laura came up with some "eye" opening results.

As a quick reminder, tracking eye movements as an indication of what draws users attentions online has been with us for some time. But the technology has never been more advanced. Steve told me, "this is the first time we've been able to do eyetracking without the test participants having to wear awkward camera headgear. We used the latest generation of eyetracking hardware, which uses a small video camera positioned underneath a typical-looking PC monitor. While testing was still done in a lab environment (an office with desk, PC, and no other distractions), this represents a far more realistic Web viewing environment than past studies."

Some of their general findings:

Look Left! The eyes most often focused first on the upper left of the page, stay there before moving left to right - and then the eyes stayed glued to the top portion of the page for several seconds before exploring farther down the page.

Know if you want them to skim or read! Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page, especially in the upper left, but smaller type encourages more focused viewing behavior (really reading the words) while larger print promoted scanning. In fact, according to Outing, when "you have a mix of headlines and blurbs, contrasting size between the headlines and blurb seemed to encourage more scanning (i.e, looking at the headline, but not the blurbs). When type size was smaller and headlines were smaller, they tended to be read more as blocks -- more fixations on more words and more reading."

Use care when adding those lines and boxes in your experience! Visual breaks - like a line or rule - discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break.

Keep the language simple and blunt! As typical headlines receive less than a second of eye fixation, the first couple of words must be real attention grabbers. Shorter paragraphs performed better than longer ones.

And, no surprise, the behaviors for advertising online were similar: Look Left (again!) Ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations - right side didn't do as well.

Lines and boxes can become ad killers! Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen - but if separated by a line or white space, received fewer fixations than when there was no banner.

Don't underestimate the power of text! Text ads were viewed most intently, by a factor of almost four to one. Fascinatingly, text is very powerful - especially for facts, names, and places in recall - while new, less familiar conceptual information was better recalled in multimedia/graphic format. Animation seemed to attract a bit more than static ads, but the static ads were often looked at more intently.

Size matters! But you knew that... But Outing drove the point home with me. "Small banners weren't looked at much (I don't mean they weren't clicked on, they weren't ever looked at), yet when you look at real news Web sites, they're still common."

Steve and Laura admit upfront that this kind of research has its limitations -- 46 people is small, though larger, I might add, than most focus groups sites use. And yet the consistency of results is stunning. And more stunning is the number of sites you can visit that, in fact, are designed in direct conflict to these findings.

Go to the survey and decide for yourself. Is your site, are your ads, working for you and your clients? Would a little bit of smarter design work keep your audiences longer, raise the awareness and actions of your advertising?

Let me know.