There is an interesting article entitled The Best of Eyetrack III:What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes. Researchers tracked users' eye movements on mock news-oriented web pages and generated maps indicating where the readers paused and for how long.

Oooh doesn't that make you wonder how well your library web site page would have done?

Some Interesting Findings:

• Upper left section of page gets most attention.
• Dominant headlines get more attention than photos
• The standard one-column format performed better in terms of number of eye fixations
• The first words of a headline, or the left 1/3 of a blurb, get mostattention.
• Summary descriptions (extended deck headlines, paragraph length) were popular
• Photos larger than 230 pixels wide & deep, showing people's faces, do best.
• Short paragraphs get more attention than long ones.
• Top of page is the best location for nav bars.
• Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs on the homepage.

One really interesting discovery was, "Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured their attention." Huh, well I wouldn't change my whole website to tiny font, it is interesting that if I want people to closely read a paragraph, I shouldn't make it in large font.

So how did your website do?