You probably read many blogs, books and other content that tells you how to build a great blog. Often this advice is contradictory! The opinions of bloggers are based on their experiences and what works for them. This blog included! So it’s refreshing to find some real empirical evidence that can tell us how people read websites, how they look for information, what attracts their eyes, and how they navigate pages.
This is the research called Eyetrack III.
Believe me, you will find the results of this research an amazing eye-opener. You just got to read it!
I’ve extracted what I think are the 12 most interesting statements from the research (below) which gives us tips on how to design our blog’s content, templates and layout.
Read the report…. does your blog fit to what the research suggests? (Wait… I betta check this one does too!)
Here are the 12 best bits:
- “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page”
- “A headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention”
- “The bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it”
- “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
- “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
- “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones”
- “The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right”
- “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations”
- “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior…. larger type promotes lighter scanning”
- “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen”
- “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen”
- “Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages”