Eyetracker Study gives Guidance on how to Place Ads, Etc

The Usability Company and Eyetracker recently conducted an eyetracking study to provide more information on where designers should place elements, such as logos, search boxes and advertisements on a website, by determining where people look on a page.

They studied eye movements of people using three well-known newspaper sites - The
Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. Participants in the research were asked to complete a number of very simple tasks on the three sites. These tasks were typical of the kinds of things people would be doing in the real world. For example, the first task they were asked to
complete was ‘Please go to the Business sect ion of the site’. The order of the sites was rotated to minimise any learning effects.

While using the sites peoples’ eye movements were recorded and they were questioned about their impressions of the sites. Each participant completed a questionnaire to determine if they could recall the advertisements on each site.

The research suggests:
* People learned very quickly where advertisements were likely to appear on a site and subsequently ignored those areas of the page when browsing. For example, while people viewed the adverts on the right hand side of the Guardian home page they rarely, if ever, looked to the
right hand side of subsequent pages on the Guardian site - they had ‘learned’ that this area was reserved for advertising and therefore not of interest to them. Likewise having seen the banner ad at the top of The Times homepage very few people looked at the banner ad on other pages of the site. This finding has, of course, repercussions for all those sites that have a template design where advertisements will always be presented in the same position. It would certainly be more effective to alter the positioning of advertising from page to page (or at least section to section) of a site.

* When asked to go to one of the main sections of the sites ( ie. business section) participants found the section much faster on The Times and The FT sites compared to the Guardian site. The reasons are twofold:
1. people have learned that a site’s main navigation resides more often than not on the left hand side of the page (when asked to find the sites’ main sections peoples’ eyes went directly to the left hand side of the page)
2. people find it much easier to scan information vertically than horizontally. Advertising positioned within the body of the site has a far greater probability of being recalled than advertising located in the ‘traditional’ areas for advertising - at the top of the page and to the right hand side.
* Not surprisingly people’s eyes were drawn to images and to headlines. However, people's eyes were much more likely to fixate on a line of text rather than a block. This is consistent with the finding in many usability studies that people are reluctant to read online - preferring to scan
instead.
* People could recall the presence of animated advertising on sites much more than static advertising but the recall of the content of animated advertising was not any better than static advertisements.
* While there were variations in the eye movements of people from site to site and even from page to page within each site the following pattern consistently emerged. It appears that people look to the middle of a page initially then towards the area usually inhabited by the logo of the site, followed by the left hand side (where they expect to find the main navigation) before scanning the areas to the right of the page.

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