The Blog of Author David Allen

Tag: nielsen eye tracking

  • Research Study – How the “F-Shaped Pattern” Can Help People ‘See’ Your Message

    yard gate by jmoconnor at sxc.hu
    yard gate by jmoconnor at sxc.hu

    Does someone ‘get’ your message just because they are on your website?

    In this post, you’ll learn how most people read websites – so your message has the greatest possible impact.

    —

    What People Do When They Get YOUR Message

    You worked hard writing a message for someone. The least they could do is pay attention to what you created FOR them, right?

    Instead, what happens?

    • If people have to click, most don’t get to your content in the first place.
    • If they get there, they read the first line and then get distracted- possibly by a squirrel passing by.
    • Or they’ll skip down to the bottom of your page to see what your point is, without having any idea why that point matters. Then, instead of going back up to reread it with proper context, they leave.

    What’s Really Going On?

    It’s not your job to teach people how to think. We can’t be George Costanza, waging war on reality, and  insisting that people will pay attention to our content ‘because it’s on TV’.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5bCDayoAw]

    Rather than going up to every potential reader, slapping them in the face, and telling them to ignore thousands of hours of conditioning, lets put all their conditioning to your advantage.

    Jakob Nielsen, web usability expert and principal of Nielson Norman Group, published an eye-tracking research study back in 2006 that tracked the eye movements of 236 people at different websites.

    The findings?

    People typically follow a similar pattern with their eyes when scanning websites.

    It looks like this:

    F-Pattern of Web Usability, Nielsen Eye Tracking
    1. Left to Right – Is the important stuff there?
    2. Left to Right, a bit lower – Is it maybe down here?
    3. The side bar on your website – What else is there?

    The Takeaway

    If your most important message/action steps lie outside that F, most people aren’t seeing it.

    Several more takeaways:

    1. Most people won’t read everything.
    2. The most important info or attention grabbing writing, needs to be said in the first two paragraphs.
    3. Have sub headlines and bullet-points so that the rest of your writing is scannable.

    For more articles, and for a guide to writing on the web, check out Nielsen’s website.

    For a link to the original article, check it out here. I discovered this principle while reading a book by Jon Wuebben.

    Don’t get angry. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, put your most important content in the places where people naturally look.

    What will you do with this information? Will the Nielsen Eye Tracking study change how you lay out your emails, blog posts, and letters? Let me know in the comments.