Hey, What Are You Looking At?
The latest issue of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox newsletter is about how users read on the Web, whether they scroll down pages, and what kind of attention they pay to particular page elements.
Take a look at the graphics under the heading “Scrolling Behaviors” that show readers’ attention, captured through eye-tracking technology, and particularly at the “gaze plots.”
Note that the final paragraph of the text-heavy Amazon.com page on the left gets a lot of concentrated attention. That shouldn’t happen, if it’s true that people don’t like to scroll down to read long chunks of text on the Web.
Nielsen does not say which of the three pages in that graphic got readers to buy the item(s) in question, rather than just to browse pages about them. That would be even more interesting.
Source
Scrolling and Attention, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 22, 2010.
