![]() ![]() The digits 1960 probably attracted attention since users were trying to learn when the dancer began his education.Ĭaption: A user researching hikes in South America on scanned directly to the short, bulleted list in each hike’s description. The heatmap shows the F-pattern on the left and the spotted pattern on the right side of the page.Ĭaption: A zoomed portion of the previous heatmap shows that the users were highly focused on the information about Baryshnikov’s education, which was their task. Caption: The heatmap shows an aggregate of six users who were using Wikipedia to learn about the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. The spotted scanning pattern is slightly more operative than the F-pattern if the web designers did a good job naming links, making important words look different from the rest of the body text, and creating bulleted lists. They resemble a word that the user looks for to accomplish the current task (for example, capital letters for an address, digits for a piece of numeric information).They visually stand out in the text because they are styled differently (e.g., links, differently colored words, bolded words, bulleted lists).The user chooses words because one of two reasons: ![]() ![]() The spotted scanning pattern involves fixating on specific words or chunks of words spread throughout the page. Larger dots represent longer fixations and the numbers denote their order.) Spotted Pattern These lines help us to follow the sequence of fixations. The lines between the dots represent saccades in which the user is moving the eyes and is virtually blind. Right-to-left languages such as Arabic favor a reversed F-pattern, like the one seen in this study participant’s gaze plot, as he was scanning a page on an Arabic website. The red color on this heatmap is an example of the F-shaped pattern - same today as when we first reported it in 2006. (In right-to-left languages the pattern is mirrored vertically, with more attention being spent on the right side of the page.) : This heatmap aggregates data from 47 people as they tried to learn how many Sumatran tigers live in the wild. In left-to-right languages, text on the left and towards the top of the page is read more than text on the right or towards the bottom of the page. This scanning behavior results in an eyetracking pattern that resembles the capital letter F - hence, our name for this pattern. In the absence of subheadings and bullets, users tend to fixate on the words toward the beginning of lines and toward the top of the page. ![]() Note that there are other patterns that may be used when the page content involves a lot of images (e.g., the zigzag pattern and exhaustive review). In this article, I focus on the 4 patterns that people use to scan text on the web (listed below in increasing order, worst to best, of effectiveness): Our eyetracking research has identified multiple scanning patterns for webpages. The type of page content (e.g., text versus images).Their assumptions from previous experiences with the internet, site, or brand.How people read on the web is highly contingent upon: They have learned that scanning can deliver almost the same amount of information as reading, but with significant less time and effort. They naturally attempt to be efficient and put in the least possible work for achieving their goal. On the web, people don’t read every word on a page instead, they scan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |