Eyetracking News

A site that's come to me via boingboing, analyses the way that people use and read news websites, the areas of the page and text that they focus on most, and the general approach of consumers to the presented page. This was done by tracking the movements of roughly 250 San Francisco residents whilst they were using simualted news webpages and then analysing the results of how the read the page. It sounds dry, but is actually fascinating reading. And don't just read the headline.

The image shows is a 'heatmap' of user's eye movements when looking at a blurb following a headline.

"Particularly interesting was people's behavior when there were headlines and blurbs used on homepages. Eyetrack III test participants tended to view both the headline and blurb when the headline was bold and the same size as blurb text and immediately preceded the blurb on the same line.


With a headline larger than the blurb and on a separate line, people tended to view the headlines and skip the blurbs; they scanned the headlines throughout the page more than the group that looked at the smaller headlines."

link