Interesting for Web Designers only

It seems a sensible enough idea: show people web pages, track their eye movements while browsing and voila – you can figure out which page designs work best. It’s the sort of thing that marketing people (booo hiss) love and I can see the appeal, but like much audience research it does work better when you’re thinking about news in its role as entertainment rather than education. It also tends to ignore the value of good writing. I think that our gaze is partly driven by a sort of pre-reading that we do with our peripheral vision based on word shapes. Good writers unconsciously incorporate this into their style and make text that looks attractive as well as sounding good when read. Even so, it’s definitely worth a look.

Eyetrack III – What You Most Need to Know