How much of a webpage do you actually look at? - Reader Response

Eyetrack studies: What we've learned and how to conduct your own

This post provides four examples of what most web users do when browsing the internet.

1. Users will skip anything that looks like an ad
2. Readers like “F”s
3. The higher your search engine rank, the more visitors you will attract
4. Young people want info and they want it now

Being an amateur web designer I can relate to this post as I do skip through a lot of content on the web and only check out what catches my eye or keeps me interested. I am really curios how they would study this. Do they put a bunch of people in a room on computers browsing the internet and record them? It makes you wonder what kind of habits we have. I wonder how I would compare to other people.

In the study it says that users will skip anything that looks like an ad and I believe this unless the ad had some sort of interaction involved. I am sure we all remember the old myspace ads that had you shoot something then you win some outrageous prize. I haven’t come across one of those recently but I have seen some that are designed really well and animated which draws me in.

Here is an image demonstrating with the heat filter where your eyes look most.



Apparently readers browse sites like they are “F”s which is completely understandable. All the cool interesting stuff is at the top, then in the middle there is that extra bit of information that you just have to have, and then finally you get bored at the bottom of the site with a bunch of unnecessary content.

"At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored." (1000 WORDS)

Number three the higher your search engine the more visitors you will attract. This is obvious everybody clicks on the first few links they come across when searching on Google. I need to look into finding out how to get my websites ranks up. Same story with number four young people want info and they want it now. Like for example you make a search and you don’t find what you want on the first few pages, so you change the keywords in your search bar and try a different search.

I found this post very helpful for my future in web design they also included links of site that will test the friendliness of my page; CrazyEgg and clickdensity.