[Sigia-l] F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

[Brett Taylor]

Also, hasn't it already been proven years ago that people tend to skim
web pages looking for interesting facts, probably not unlike people
skimming news papers until they find what they want to engage in.

Is he really saying anything new? 


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-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Paola Kathuria
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 9:38 AM
To: SIG-IA
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

alist146 wrote:
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

I'm glad that people run experiments but I fail to see how this
experiment can be generalised outside of its experimental conditions.

The heat maps all show 'hotter' areas on the left. It seems reasonable
that it would take longer to find the start of the compared to time to
read the last word on a line. And a page that's split into paragraphs
(including search results) will cause vertical gaps in eye-tracking.
Both these factors will inevitably combine to produce an F pattern ("if
you squint").

I'd be interested to see eyetracking results from the following
conditions and, more importantly, where subjects are actually
*motivated* to read or interact with the content (other than being paid
for their time).

- content with no paragraph break and no sub-headings
- content with sub-headings but no paragraph breaks otherwise
- content with sub-headings and paragraph breaks
- content with pull-quotes

(One would also need to control for position of navigation and ads.
Doesn't anyone do web research where they create sites for testing
rather than compare existing sites which differ in a huge number of
factors, making any comparison
meaningless?)

Anyway, this will probably confirm what Nielsen has already said in the
past: people don't read everything and that they'll first skim a page
(by picking out prominent text such as bold text and bright links).

Otherwise, I think that the F pattern is just an artefact of normal eye
movements during reading of content with paragraph breaks.


Paola
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