Eye tracking studies give web designers insight into what attracts the attention of visitors. This is very important in business web design. Once you have optimized your website to bring in traffic, following a few design rules can make sure you catch your reader’s attention. After all, most visitors make up their mind to stay of go in the first few seconds.

Results from the Nielsen Norman Group’s study show that the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an “F”. Web visitors begin in the upper left and sweep to the right. They then drop down the page a bit and do a shorter horizontal sweep and then they scan down the left side content.

From eye tracking studies we can establish 10 guidelines for web design.

1. Content / Images in the upper left quadrant are most likely to be seen
2. Right side content and content lower on the page is less likely to be seen.
3. Larger font headlines draw the eye.
4. Shorter paragraphs are read more than large blocks of text.
5. Smaller font body text is read and larger font body text is scanned.
6. Numbers are read as numerals, but skipped over as text.
7. Bigger images get more attention than smaller images.
8. Bulleted or numbered lists hold readers attention
9. Banner ads are ignored.
10. Fancy fonts and fancy words look like promotion and are ignored.

The last point was well illustrated with the U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage. In a study, 86% of users failed to the country’s current population which was presented in a large red font.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.