My new time management plan has taken a bit of a backward step today. It’s nearly 11pm and I’m going through a backlog of emails and links that I’ve been meaning to read for weeks. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow for that day of rest, eh?

Anyway whilst reading through some old emails I came across a very interesting one from Kim Roach which suggests that people view websites in a very unusual way. It reinforced something that Bill had said to me just a few short weeks ago. It’s all about the letter F.

The article by Kim is based on research by a company called Eyetrack who study online behaviour. Essentially what Eyetrack do is get people to read websites, study where their eyes spend the most time and then generate heatmaps to show the most popular browsing patterns. There’s an example of a heatmap at the Poynter Extra website.

There’s a link to the full article above so I won’t go into great depth. Suffice to say that it makes for interesting reading. The thing that got me, though, was that it’s suggested that people scan a website in an F shape (i.e. top left across the page, back down the left side and only venturing across the page if they see something of interest). This kind of goes against Google’s AdSense heatmap which suggests more of an E shape.

Either way, the research backs up what most designers have said for some time now. Navigation needs to be top of the screen and if you’re going vertical, do it on the left. It confirms that bold headings attract the most attention (duh!). It also says that bigger pictures get more attention than smaller ones. Finally it says that most users suffer from ad blindness (i.e. don’t ever look at your ads).

I’m thinking of a change of career. I’m guessing these guys got paid a lot of money to research this. Whoever paid them could have given me half as much and got the answer in 5 minutes!

Tech Tags : Site Design, AdSense, Google, Online Marketing, Advertising