First, they found that there is such a thing as writing for the web. Good web writing helps people glance, skip and find content quickly. It also helps people remember more of the information on the page. Use bullets, headlines, subheadlines and tighter writing.

Second, they concluded that “On home pages and story level pages, eye patterns indicated that text that isn’t precise and images that aren’t information-bearing don’t get looks, amounting to wasted space.”

I buy half of this conclusion: text that isn’t precise doesn’t get looks. Umm, yeah! But how is this different than the first finding?

The second half of this conclusion assumes that space can only be used for information. That’s just incorrect. Images and space can be used for a lot of different reasons, including as design devices to channel attention to from one part of a page to another. More significantly, however, images and space are elemental design attributes that should be used to create and extend the user’s experience, and their connection to the site’s overall brand position. Finally, the nature of this study focuses on how much time people spend looking at given sections of the page. Do they know that they mind can process images a lot faster than it can read a headline or a paragraph of text? These guys are very smart, and we have a lot to learn from them, but be careful with this finding or your designs will end up looking like this.

Finally, they concluded that “images are not always worth a thousand words.” They heed a warning against using superfluous images. According to their findings, images are only well received when they are related to the content, clear, feature approachable people, and (I kid you not, this was in the report) feature areas of private anatomy. Say what?

The crotch finding strikes me as odd. Maybe I am reading this wrong, but it seems like the report is saying images are ok only when they are relevant, clear, approachable and they feature a crotch. I think many of us would agree most of this advice is good.

I am just upset that they didn’t post the original picture of George Brett. The heat signature is in my way.

Labels: usability

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posted by Andres Zapata @ 10:13 AM