VirtualHosting has published a list of lessons taken from eye-tracking studies over the years. As applied to web design, eye-tracking is a method of analyzing user interactions according to how information is oriented on the page. It’s especially vital in layouts which are complex but also expect users to focus on different elements in a specific order — this applies to advertising in particular.
Most of VirtualHosting’s list seemed straightforward, but a few points interested me:
Readers ignore banners
I guess it’s not that interesting, but I was happy to hear it. Apologies to bloggers who rely on banner ads for revenue. I will hopefully never be one of them.
Type size influences viewing behavior
One positive bi-product of the much-maligned “Web 2.0 look” is large section headers. They’re eye-catching and usually improve page scannability.
One-column formats perform better than multi-column
This can be sticky when developing news and magazine layouts. Seemingly, the trick is to give the illusion of simplicity, even though you’re presenting a ton of information. It’s also an issue of expectations — users who view NewYorkTimes.com each morning expect to be inundated with content in multiple columns, but they develop reading patterns to deal with it.
Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation
I don’t know about faces, but I know the quality of photos provided by clients is often average at best, and the effect can be distracting and off-putting. I published something awhile back about keeping your images clean and cropped.
Large blocks of text are avoided
Those big blocks definitely give me eye-fatigue. For the past couple years, I’ve been asking clients to provide me with bullet lists, photos, quotes and other concise content in place of large texty paragraphs that no one reads. The result is an infinitely more summarized, scannable page.
White space is good
This is one of the hardest issues for a client to understand, but if you gain their trust and use whitespace well, it’s one of the most gratifying.
11:06 am
WOW – thank you for providing this info – it is a great reminder of good design.
7:15 pm
“White Space is Good” I have a client who just absolutely refuses to believe this. It drives me nuts trying to convince him that every area of his site doesn’t need to have content in it, but he’s constantly sending me picture to put n different sections, or expanding the text on the page so it matches the length of the page and images. Hopefully I can show him that article and finally get it through his head.