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Eyetracking web usability helps understand online users’ true behavior
The members of the Nielsen Norman Group are user experience pioneers. They advocated user-centered design and usability before it became popular to do so.
NN/g is preparing for their San Francisco Edition of the Usability Week 2006, from June 19-24 at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins.
The people behind NN/g are Jakob Nielsen, a guru of web page usability, Donald A. Norman, another guru in workable technology and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, arguably a leading authority on software design.
Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne are going to give a full-day tutorial on Eyetracking Web Usability or, for newbies, analyzing where your eyes glaze, on a web page. If you ever wondered if anyone was looking at your Google AdSense zone, this is the way to know, for sure.
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The tutorial addresses major issues, such as homepage and page design, banner and text-box blindness, navigation, search, people’s interactions with content, the type of pictures people pay attention to and how multimedia is perceived. Basically, it covers the bulk of what we’ve always been wondering and never knew how to scientifically measure, until now.
Jakob Nielsen has previously documented a rather common F-Shaped Pattern for readins web content, such as two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. In Mr Nielsen’s own words:
"F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website‚Äôs words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school."
This is major news since were talking about a dominant web page reading pattern across a sample of over 200 users who accepted to be analyzed.
If you’re interested in making your web pages even more interesting for your visitors, while increasing your changes of converting your pixels into sales, perhaps you should follow these guidelines. The content is easy to understand even for web development newbies.
It’s largely based on common sense.
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