One of the services that we are very proud to offer at Elevator SEO, is web usability analysis and reporting. For the first blog post about web usability I thought I would demonstrate the ‘F-Pattern’ eye tracking images. So what do these images show? Well it’s a bit like a thermal image for demonstrating how the standard user views a web page. The areas that appear ‘hotter’ in red and yellow are the areas the user has spent the most time looking at. The blue areas have been viewed but only for a very short amount of time. Any area not coloured has not been looked at directly.
So what do the above images tell us, and more importantly how do they help us in terms of usability?
The image on the left shows a standard web page and what it shows us is that the average users views the content at the top of the page the most but only really focuses on the first 2-4 paragraphs of text. Anything longer than that is not really read properly by the average user. There attention has also been drawn in by the navigation on the left, and a call out on the right of the page. In terms of designing a website, this tells us we should keep content short / succint and prioritise the most important information at the top of the page (much like with SEO). There also appears to be 2 sets of navigation (the top and the left side). The navigation on the left had more viewing time than the top which shows the importance of placement of your navigation in the page (when you consider the user, not just what you thinks looks prettiest). The result shows an ‘F’ style pattern, which is why this is called the F-pattern eye tracking image.
The second image shows much the same, with attention being drawn to the image and call out boxes (highlighted information).
The third image shows a search engine result page (SERP) which again follows the format of the F-Pattern in the way it is viewed by the user. What is also interesting is that the top 5 results are the most viewed along with the top sponsored links, which supports the belief that most users don’t get past the 2nd or 3rd page of the SERPs.
