Eye tracking Web usability | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com.
A writeup of a study be Jakob Nielsen, who is usually referred and deferred to in the same fashion as this story does, as a "user interface guru." What I find absorbing here is the attempt to figure out how people physically respond to what they see on their monitors.
"The real highlight [of the study] is that peoples' eyes flitter fast across pages. Very little time is allocated to each page element, so you have to be brief and concise in communicating online," Nielsen said. "They don't look in on, across the lines of a page, and often fixate on something, such as the first few words of a headline, for only a tenth of second. The right-hand side is often never in view of the eyes. People look down the pages in an 'F' pattern [see example on the left], with a few stripes at top–the first one longer than the second–and then down the long vertical stripe to see if is any else. Sometime the track turns into an 'E' pattern but it's usually an F."
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