Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
What eye movement teaches us about web design
Virtual Hosting has an excellent article up detailing 23 actionable web design lessons that we can learn from eye-tracking studies. Most of the items are common sense: people scan web pages rather than read them, people look at the top left corner of the page first, people ignore banner ads, people ignore fancy formating that looks like ads, etc. But why do people interact with pages in this manner?The answer should be obvious: web designers have trained visitors to use their sites in a certain way. Yahoo, Google, AOL, and MSN all format their sites according to the above listed guidelines. Because of this, people expect site names and logos to be a the top left. They expect banner shaped images to be banners and therefore ignorable. They expect sites to look, feel, and function a certain way and they are very frustrated when they don't.
In a way it is like news papers. People expect news papers to look and function a certain way no matter what city or country they are in. Its perpetually reinforcing as each site that follows this standard pattern (which is not a bad pattern by any means) causes more users to expect the next site they visit to look the same. It is good because it promotes usability but bad because it limits creativity and new design patterns. People have to innovative inside a very small box.
Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsChris CareyNov 15th 2007 10:02AM
This is really nothing new, thats why you usually see effective adsense being placed in a F pattern. You would be surprised how much of a difference you will get just by moving your ads to create a F at the left side of your page.
Check out http://www.noheat.com for an example. I tripled my ad revenue by doing this.
james 42Nov 15th 2007 10:27PM
Flash addicts should read this, sort of removes any reason to use Flash to build a site. Most sites that is, there are a lot of cool sites built in Flash that do their own thing. But far too many web 'designers' abuse Flash and make crappy sites. OK, I really should not be dumping on Flash, there are a whole lot of HTML sites that are crap too.
JamesNov 19th 2007 5:08PM
James, yes you should in fact be "dumping" on Flash. It's shit; it's always been shit; it turns all that it touches into shit. It's a viable mechanism for cross-platform development of simple games, and for really, really crappy streaming video, and that's about it. Any time I go to a corporate web page that's just one big Flash blob, I look for a "Low Bandwidth Version", and if they don't have one, I email the web admin to complain. Flashblock is second most useful Firefox extension on my computer, after Adblock.
Flash is a usability nightmare, and should be treated by any sane designer exactly like the festering corpse of a diseased rat.