Propaganda Watch: How layout and design will force your attention to bullsh*t

[Satyagraha]

As print media gives way to online publications, I thought it would be a good idea to examine the science behind the construction of mainstream media online news pages. Propaganda is delivered in the content of the articles, but it is also delivered in a more subtle way; by manipulating how you will 'see' the news page.

There is a science to design and layout of a page with the intent to maximize focus on specific areas. The propaganda machines are well-aware of this, and they USE this scientific data to plan the placement of specific articles relative to other articles and advertising on their news websites.  Examples of the use of data from 'eye movement' analysis will follow in this thread, but first let's look at the science of 'eye movement' and the kinds of information that can be extrapolated from the experiments they run.

Excerpted from:
Eye tracking for people who don’t care about vision
or how to get more dependent measures
Zenzi M. Griffin
Guest lecture in Graduate Research Methods 2/19/01
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/290/EyeTrack.pdf

Why monitor eye movements?

• People can only get detailed info about a small area at a time, so they move their eyes
   Þ fovea provides detail for about 2º of visual angle
   Þ parafoveal & peripheral vision fuzzy; provide info for deciding where to foveate next
  (Note: Definition of Fovea: In the eye, a tiny pit located in the macula of the retina that provides the clearest vision of all.
   Only in the fovea are the layers of the retina spread aside to let light fall directly on the cones, the cells
   that give the sharpest image. Also called the central fovea or fovea centralis.)

• Fixation location highly correlated with attention
   Þ tend to move eyes to what is attended
• Fixation duration correlated with cognitive processing difficulty
   Þ e.g., word frequency & contextual constraint in reading
• Eye tracking provides a non-intrusive, on-line measure of allocation of visual attention.
• Eye movement data may be informative about processing in a wide variety of tasks.

Properties of eye movements

• Eye position is stable for 200-300 ms (fixation) before rapidly moving (saccade) to a new location.
• Even when stable, there is jitter (nystagmus)
• During saccades, no new visual information acquired (saccadic suppression).
• Mean fixation duration and saccade distance vary with task & stimulus.
• Attention moves to a location in space before eyes do.
• Time to plan a saccade is 150-175 ms (saccade latency)
   Þ longer for bigger distances & more precise destination
• For study of information processing, usually ignore other types of eye movements
   Þ pursuit, vergence, vestibular

Some applications

• Moment-by-moment effects in reading
• Implicit memory for people & scenes
• Scope of planning in typing, music-reading, & speech production
• Options considered in decision making


Some dependent measures

• Fixation duration; # fixations; (often least useful for higher-level cognition studies)
• # gazes
   Þ Gaze composed of sequential fixations within experimenter-defined region
• p(fixating object); First pass gaze duration; Total gaze duration; also frequency of particular sequences of gazes;
   mean saccade distance; saccade latency given a change in the display or a cue Issues in data analysis
• How is data recorded?
   Þ on video or as coordinates in a computer file?
• How is point of regard determined?
   Þ hand-coded from video or automatically relating coordinates to 3D objects or 2D picture content?
• How are fixations, saccades, & blinks defined?
   Þ variability in algorithms may lead to different fixation durations
• How are gazes defined?
  Þ Do intermediate saccades count?

Data analysis

• Often the data must undergo a number of transformations to yield measures for analysis.
• Samples ® fixations & saccades ® gazes
• Even once gazes extracted, might need to consider timing of other processes.
   Þ Onset of observers speech
   Þ Onset of word in speech observer is listening to
   Þ Onset of response

Video based tracking

• Infrared light (invisible) reflects off eye
• Infrared image recorded by video camera with filter
• Image processing software calculates locations of pupil and reflection off the cornea.
   Þ Relative positions change with eye position
   Þ Calibration procedure relates relative positions to fixating particular points in space
   Þ Various methods for extrapolating to intermediate positions
   (we'll ignore the more intrusive & difficult to use methods of eye tracking here, as well as those that don't
    provide point of regard)


Summary

• Eye tracking provides a non-intrusive, on-line measure of allocation of visual attention.
• Useful for studying a wide variety of questions.
• But relatively expensive to set up initially.
• Best system depends on task.
• Coping with large amounts of data or extracting most useful measure may prove challenging.

References to some basic eye movement studies & reviews

Buswell, G. T. (1935). How people look at pictures. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Henderson, J. M., & Hollingsworth, A. (1999). High-level scene perception,
Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 50, pp. 243-271).

Irwin, D. E., Carlson-Radvansky, L. A., & Andrews, R. V. (1995). Information processing during saccadic eye movements.
Acta Psychologica, 90, 261-273.

McConkie, G. W. (1981). Evaluating and reporting data quality in eye-movement research.
Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 13, 97-106.

McConkie, G. W., & Currie, C. B. (1996). Visual stability across saccades while viewing complex pictures.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 563-581.

McConkie, G. W., Scouten, C. W., Bryant, P. K., & Wilson, J. (1988).
A microcomputer-based software package for eye monitoring research.
Behavior Research Methods Instruments & Computers, 20, 142-149.

Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.
Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372-422.

Reichle, E. D., Pollatsek, A., Fisher, D. L., & Rayner, K. (1998). Toward a model of eye
movement control in reading.
Psychological Review, 105, 123-157.

Theeuwes, J., Kramer, A. F., Hahn, S., & Irwin, D. E. (1998). Our eyes do not always go where
we want them to go: Capture of the eyes by new objects.
Psychological Science, 9, 379 -385.

Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye Movements and Vision (L. A. Riggs, Trans.).
New York: Plenum Press.

References to some eye movement studies of particular processes

Althoff, R. R., & Cohen, N. J. (1999). Eye-movement-based memory effect: A reprocessing
effect in face perception.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 997-1010.

Brandt, S. A., & Stark, L. W. (1997). Spontaneous eye movements during visual imagery reflect
the content of the visual scene.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9.

Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (1976). Linguistic influences on picture scanning.
In R. A. Monty & J. W. Senders (Eds.), Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (pp. 459-472).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carroll, P. J., Young, J. R., & Guertin, M. S. (1992). Visual analysis of cartoons: A view from the far side.
In K. Rayner (Ed.), Eye movements and visual cognition: Scene perception and reading (pp. 444-461).
New York: Springer-Verlag.

Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language:
A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing.
Cognitive Psychology, 6, 84-107.

D'Ydewalle, G., & Gielen, I. (1992). Attention allocation with overlapping sound, image, and text.
In K. Rayner (Ed.), Eye movements and visual cognition: Scene perception and reading (pp. 415-427).
New York: Springer-Verlag.

Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking.
Psychological Science, 11, 274-279.

Henderson, J. M., & Hollingsworth, A. (1999). The role of fixation position in detecting scene changes across saccades.
Psychological Science, 10, 438 -443.

Kinsler, V., & Carpenter, R. H. S. (1995). Saccadic eye movements while reading music.
Vision research, 35, 1447-1458.

Lansing, C. R., & McConkie, G. W. (1999). Attention to facial regions in segmental and prosodic visual speech perception tasks.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 42, 526-539.

Meyer, A. S., Sleiderink, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1998). Viewing and naming objects: Eye movements during noun phrase production.
Cognition, 66, B25-B33.

Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1997). Eye movements, the eye-hand span, and the perceptual span during sight-reading of music.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 6, 49-53.

Russo, J. E., & Rosen, L. D. (1975). An eye fixation analysis of multialternative choice.
Memory & Cognition, 3, 267-276.

Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess.
American Scientist, 61, 394-403.

Tanenhaus, M. K., Magnuson, J. S., Dahan, D., & Chambers, C. (2000). Eve movements and lexical access in spoken-language comprehension:
Evaluating a linking hypothesis between fixations and linguistic processing.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 557-580.

Zelinsky, G. J., & Murphy, G. L. (2000). Synchronizing visual and language processing: An effect of object name length on eye movements.
Psychological Science, 11, 125-131.

Zelinsky, G. J., & Sheinberg, D. L. (1997). Eye movements during parallel-serial visual search.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 244-262.


URLs for more information
Eye tracking net http://www.eyetracking.net/
Eye movement equipment database http://ibs.derby.ac.uk/emed/
Archives of the eye movement listserv http://listserv.spc.edu/archives/eyemov-l.html

[Satyagraha]

Commercial applications for 'eye movement' studies: vendors of tools for propagandists:


A note from Dr. Mario R. Garcia
http://eyetrack.poynter.org/index.html

EyeTrack research and The Poynter Institute for Media Studies have been linked for nearly 20 years. There has never been a more exciting, challenging and demanding time than now for the media to learn from the EyeTrack studies and find practical applications.

EyeTrack07 is the most comprehensive, all-inclusive and revealing of Poynter’s studies. It confirms much of what we already knew, and pushes us to make intelligent decisions, especially as we analyze print and online reading habits.

At Poynter, our interest in how readers react to what we put on the page (and now the screen) dates back to 1983, when we became curious about how newspaper readers reacted to color. For many newspapers worldwide, color use was just beginning, and publishers who invested heavily on new rotary presses felt an obligation to use color everywhere, making front pages look like Carmen Miranda hats — the tutti-frutti approach to color use.

There were also success stories of color use, at the St. Petersburg Times (owned by Poynter), the then-new USA Today and The Orange County Register.

We wanted to study color and its applications to newspapers, and provide editors and designers with guidelines for its effective use. Our study, which presented readers with five-page prototypes using various color applications, was primitive and did not yet involve the use of eyetracking equipment. The result was the publication of the book, "Color in American Newspapers."

Color in American Newspapers

What we learned:

   1. Color clearly made a difference in eye movement, even though the largest photo on the pages drew the most    
       attention, regardless of whether it was color or black and white.
   2. Color, when added below the fold, drew the eye to it, after the largest photo.
   3. Color played a more important role on lifestyle/feature pages than on news pages.
   4. Color backgrounds moved the reader to the desired spot on the page.

The results of our color test were presented in 1985 at a Poynter color conference. One participant asked, "What do you think would happen if The New York Times decided to go color in the year 2010, for example?"

Another participant ventured further, saying The Wall Street Journal brand was so associated with black and white it was hard to imagine the paper ever using color.

History has responded. The New York Times introduced color on its front page in 1997. The Wall Street Journal introduced color to its U.S. edition in 2002. Our study did not make predictions, but contributed practical tips that newspapers worldwide continue to use.

Poynter's First EyeTrack Study

In 1990, we were ready to do research with equipment that would permit us to follow readers’ eyes and see where they land on a page. This was, clearly, a more scientific approach, and the industry was eagerly waiting for the results. My colleague Dr. Pegie Stark Adam and I designed the parameters and conducted the research, with the assistance of Dr. Sharon Polansky.

To make sure we crafted the research to answer the needs of the industry, we started by sending out a questionnaire to about 500 editors and designers across the country.

Our findings:

   1. Readers entered a printed page through the largest image on the page.
   2. The majority of readers then saw the headline next before they read the text.
   3. Captions under photos were the third most frequently visited part of the page.

The Poynter-Stanford Project

Our first attempt at online EyeTrack research occurred as the industry was becoming curious about how much reading took place on news Web sites. Our colleagues Andrew DeVigal, now with The New York Times, and Marion Lewenstein, professor emeritus of communications at Stanford University, conducted the research.

The big surprise was a parade of eyeballs marching in unison across the text. Unlike print readers, who entered the page through images, online readers entered through text and headlines.

This finding caused a stir among many designers because it clashed with the generally accepted notion that graphics represent key entry points for readers of printed pages. Many print designers were, naturally, applying the same rules to the news Web sites they designed.

The findings reassured me of an observation I had been making for some time. Reading online is more like reading a book, where one concentrates on the text and prefers the photos to appear separately (explaining the rise of online photo galleries). Let nothing interrupt the flow of a narrative. Online readers were telling us this quite clearly.

EyeTrack III

Beginning in 2003, Poynter conducted a second online EyeTrack research project.

Led by Steve Outing, then of The Poynter Institute, with Laura Ruel, now of the University of North Carolina, the study found that
readers typically navigate home pages by entering at the upper left
and hovering there before moving left to right and down the page.

The research also revealed that underlining or rules —
a frequent online design element at the time—
discouraged reading,
that text rather than photos was the entry point to pages,
and that short paragraphs were read more than long ones.

We are all scanners and methodical readers

There is a continuum in all these studies, including the one about color, which did not use eyetracking technology. We found:

    * Readers are impatient.
    * All of us scan, but become more methodical readers when presented with a story that interests us.
    * Large photographs play a key role on how the eye moves on the page.

With EyeTrack07, I believe we see one of the current myths destroyed: People still read, and they will read deeply into a story, if the content interests them. For years, I have said that the “Harry Potter phenomenon” is testimony to the fact that one will read a good story. The average Harry Potter installment is about 550 pages, and 14-year-olds worldwide devour it in days.

The deep reading result described in this report might partly be explained by the use of actual hometown print and Web editions of the newspaper. We'd expect the content to be more compelling than generic prototype stories used in some of Poynter’s previous EyeTrack research.

Have we lost the reading habit? Definitely not. Do we have an aversion to content that smells old, lacks consequence to our daily lives, and repeats what we already know? A resounding "yes."

It is here that EyeTrack07 brings good tidings. The study should be a provocation to make us produce better stories in whichever medium we are working. True, there is more deep reading online (see page TK), but what’s important is that once the content and writing style "seduce" the reader, she will continue to read. Finding the right content makes the difference.

Good studies lead to provocative questions, as well as practical solutions. Here are some inspired by EyeTrack07:

1. Have we lost our ability to read in depth?

We have not lost our ability to read in depth, and, in fact, reader behavior suggests attention spans have not shortened dramatically or irreversibly. But there are more highly selective readers who choose what they want to read. Even more than we thought they would.

Most surprising, they read further into stories online than in print. That was true for stories of all lengths.

TIP: For the editor/designer, make sure that an article that should be read in-depth is packaged like a lead piece.

2. Are we a society of scanners?

Yes, we are. There is a scanner in every one of us, but there is also one very devoted and methodical reader, once we find that story we wish to read.

TIP: Editors and designers should provide well-designed navigational tools to allow scanners to choose what they want to read. Secondary readings, boxes, quotes, additional points of entry are all part of how we tip off the reader.

3. Has the newspaper habit disappeared from most people's lives?

The newspaper habit may not be as prevalent today as it was for our parents’ generation, but interest in the news is as high as or higher than ever.

Print readers who participated in this study rated the daily newspaper as their primary news source, followed by the local TV news and the Internet.

Web readers who participated in this study rated the Internet as their primary news source, followed by local TV news with the daily newspaper ranked third.

TIP: Concentrate on the best content, then decide how each medium will present it, allowing for differences and using each medium for what it can do best.

4. In a multimedia society, how can the various media compete and survive?

If your organization has not put together a small group of thinkers and visionaries to study publishing on multiple platforms and how to cross them, then start now. This may be the most important topic to deliberate in the next year.

5. Can a real "fusion" of online and print truly exist?

Fusion of print and online can only happen when a "fusion editor" is assigned. This editor needs to be someone who can keep one foot in the printed edition, one in the online edition. A number of news organizations are now taking the further step of merging the print and online operations into a single newsroom.

6. What is the new definition of news?

There was a time when news was defined as "anything you find out today that you didn't know before yesterday," as New York Times managing editor Turner Catledge once said.

Today, I believe the definition should be: News is anything you found out yesterday that you need to understand today.

TIP: Online has all the advantages of time and technology to offer updated reports, while print needs to concentrate on the good stories that create that experience. Give readers the "second-day headline" on the story’s first appearance in print, as they are likely to already know the basics from other media.

7. What role will mobile telephones, iPods and other gadgets play in our newsgathering and its dissemination?

They are important, for sure. One cannot begin to assess the impact this hardware will have in how we gather and present news to users who are constantly hungry for the latest text information and visual images.

EyeTrack07 inspires these questions and many more. I hope it will lead us to rethink how we practice our craft, and also help us define the future of storytelling as we prepare to serve — as soon as 2012 — the first generation of young adults who will not remember life without the Internet.

The late Columbia professor Dr. James W. Carey, one of the most gifted journalism academics ever, and a past Poynter Institute National Advisory Board member, once said:

"We cannot domesticate the future to bring
it under rational, predictable control."

We can, however, contemplate the future positively
and see how we can anticipate those forces that will shape
how we write, edit, design and manage in a multiplatform world.

EyeTrack07 has given us some of the tools.

— Dr. Mario R. Garcia is the CEO and founder of Garcia Media and a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board.

[Satyagraha]

The next time you look at a mainstream corporate media website, remember some of the points made in this article: AND.. particularly note what NEWS they WANT you to read, and what they want to DISTRACT you from reading. All of the techniques are nicely laid out for us in the following article by the Poynter folks....

The Best of Eyetrack III:
What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
By Steve Outing and Laura Ruel
Eyetrack III project managers
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
(Este artículo está disponible en español)

News websites have been with us for about a decade, and editors and designers still struggle with many unanswered questions: Is homepage layout effective? ... What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? ... When is multimedia appropriate? ... Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools could help answer those questions and more. Eyetracking research like this won't provide THE answer to those questions. But combined with other site metrics already used by news website managers -- usability testing, focus groups, log analysis -- the Eyetrack III findings could provide some direction for improving news websites.

In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we'll provide an overview of what we observed. You can dive into detailed Eyetrack III findings and observations on this website -- use the navigation at the top and left of this page -- at any time. If you don't know what eyetracking is, get oriented by reading the Eyetrack III FAQ.

Let's get to the key results of the study, but first, a quick comment on what this study is and is not: It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of "findings" based on controlled variables, and "observations" where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went "wide," not "deep" -- covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors. We hope that Eyetrack III is not seen as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a wave of eyetracking research that will benefit the news industry. OK, let's begin. ...

At the core: Homepage layout

While testing our participants' eye movements across several news homepage designs, Eyetrack III researchers noticed a common pattern: The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.



Depending on page layout, of course, this pattern can vary. The image above is a simplistic representation of the most common eye-movement pattern we noticed across multiple homepage designs. (In other words, don't take what you see above too seriously.)

Now also consider another Eyetrack observation: Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page -- especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right. Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren't typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen -- both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.

A quick review of 25 large news websites -- here's a list of them (see below)  -- reveals that 20 of them place the dominant homepage image in the upper left. (Most news sites have a consistent page design from day to day; they don't often vary the layout as a print newspaper would.)

News Sites We Reviewed
We wanted to compare real-world news website practices to observations we made during the Eyetrack III research, so we surveyed the sites listed below. This list is comprised of a mix of sites from the top 100 American news websites, with several from Europe added. We looked for such practices as navigation placement, types of ads used, headline font size, use of homepage blurbs with headlines, and more.

We surveyed:
    * USAToday.com
    * NYTimes.com
    * WashingtonPost.com
    * CNN.com
    * ABCNews.com
    * FOXNews.com
    * LATimes.com
    * ChicagoTribune.com
    * AJC.com
    * AZCentral.com
    * SFGate.com
    * SignonSanDiego.com
    * WashingtonTimes.com
    * MiamiHerald.com
    * Boston.com
    * StarTribune.com
    * NJ.com
    * NYPost.com
    * ProJo.com
    * DallasNews.com
    * Guardian.co.uk
    * FT.com
    * ABClocal.go.com/kabc/
    * KCNC.com
    * CSMonitor.com

We observed that with news homepages, readers' instincts are to first look at the flag/logo and top headlines in the upper left. The graphic below shows the zones of importance we formulated from the Eyetrack data. While each site is different, you might look at your own website and see what content you have in which zones.



Want people to read, not scan? Consider small type

The Eyetrack III researchers discovered something important when testing headline and type size on homepages: 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.

This was especially the case when we looked at headline size on homepages. Larger headlines encouraged scanning more than smaller ones.

(Note: We are not advocating that you run out and reduce the size of your font across the board. You should make sure that people can read the font size you select in order to achieve the appropriate balance.)

Particularly interesting was people's behavior when there were headlines and blurbs used on homepages. Eyetrack III test participants tended to view both the headline and blurb when the headline was bold and the same size as blurb text and immediately preceded the blurb on the same line.

With a headline larger than the blurb and on a separate line, people tended to view the headlines and skip the blurbs; they scanned the headlines throughout the page more than the group that looked at the smaller headlines.

Researchers believe that it is the contrast in type size that accounts for this behavior, as well as the type size itself. When a headline is larger than its accompanying blurb text, it's perceived as the important element of the headline-blurb block -- so people appear to decide that viewing the headline is sufficient and they skip the blurb.

Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs on the homepage:

This may be related to a phenomenon that we noted throughout the testing: visual breaks -- like a line or rule -- discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break, like a blurb. (This also affects ads, which we address below.)

When we look at news websites, we find that the vast majority of them (22 out of 25) use blurbs to accompany headlines on their homepages. It's the rare ones that use only headlines: CNN.com, NYPost.com, and ProJo.com. In terms of headline size, we observed about an even split between using larger type size for headlines vs. smaller type.

We found that 12 out of 22 news sites that use blurbs on their homepage put rules under their headlines.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about type and blurbs here and here.

Partial viewing of headlines, blurbs found to be common

We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words -- and only read on if they are engaged by those words.

Here's a heatmap of a blurb demonstrating this. (A heatmap is an aggregate view of all the eye fixations of our test subjects. Below, the orange area was viewed the most, the blue areas the least.)



 With a list of headlines on a homepage, we can see where people looked with eyetracking -- and again, most often it's the left sides of the headlines. People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don't view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on. On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention.

For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.

The same goes for blurbs -- perhaps even more so. Our findings about blurbs suggest that not only should they be kept short, but the first couple of words need to grab the viewer's attention.

On the 25 news websites we reviewed, there's considerable variety in blurbs. Average blurb length varies from a low of about 10 words to a high of 25, with most sites coming in around 17.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about blurbs here.

What creates "hot spots"?

In Eyetrack III, we tested several homepage designs, watching where on the page people looked. As you would expect, lower parts of the page -- especially areas you have to scroll to view -- receive modest viewing. But that doesn't mean you can't get people to look at content low on a scrolling page.

On a couple of our test homepages, we found "hot spots" for some stories. Perhaps because our testing took place in San Francisco, research subjects were drawn to one story about the site "Craig's List" (a local online community popular since its inception in 1995). The headline for that story had an inordinate number of eye fixations compared to surrounding content, even though it was below the first visible screen of the page. We observed a similarly high number of eye fixations on a headline about clothing maker FCUK, which was placed far down on a page with a long list of headlines and blurbs.

We think this spells good news for those websites with homepages that extend well beyond the initial screen view. Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. What happens, however, is that their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention. Their eyes may fixate on an interesting headline or a stand-out word, but not on other content. Again, this points to the necessity of sharp headline writing.

[Read more on what Eyetrack III says about homepage design here and here.]

Where's your navigation?

While testing several homepage designs, we varied the placement of a navigation element: top (under the flag or logo), left column, and right column.

Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration. In a survey of 25 top news sites, we found 11 that used top position navigation. The other 14 used left navigation. Seven of the 25 used left and top navigation elements. None of the 25 sites we surveyed used right side navigation. It's rare, but you can find right navigation in the news website world.

It might surprise you to learn that in our testing we observed better usage (more eye fixations and longer viewing duration) with right-column navigation than left. While this might have been the novelty factor at play -- people aren't used to seeing right-side navigation -- it may indicate that there's no reason not to put navigation on the right side of the page and use the left column for editorial content or ads.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about navigation here.

What about article layout, writing style?

Eyetrack III results suggests various characteristics of article writing and layout can affect a reader's viewing behavior.

For example, let's take average paragraph length. Most news sites run articles with medium-length paragraphs -- somewhere (loosely) around 45-50 words, or two or three sentences. In a survey of 25 top news sites, however, we did find seven that routinely edited articles to make paragraphs shorter -- often only one sentence per paragraph.

Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.

Most news website article pages present stories in a single column of text, but a handful of sites -- like IHT.com and TheHerald.co.uk -- mimic newspaper layout and present articles in two or three side-by-side columns. Is this as readable as the traditional (for the Web) one-column article format?

Eyetrack III results showed that the standard one-column format performed better in terms of number of eye fixations -- in other words, people viewed more. However, bear in mind that habit may have affected this outcome. Since most people are accustomed to one-column Web articles, the surprise of seeing three-column type might have affected their eye behavior.

What about photos on article pages? It might surprise you that our test subjects typically looked at text elements before their eyes landed on an accompanying photo, just like on homepages. As noted earlier, the reverse behavior (photos first) occurred in previous print eyetracking studies.

Finally, there's the use of summary descriptions (extended deck headlines, paragraph length) leading into articles. These were popular with our participants. When our testers encountered a story with a boldface introductory paragraph, 95 percent of them viewed all or part of it.

When people viewed an introductory paragraph for between 5 and 10 seconds -- as was often the case -- their average reading behavior of the rest of the article was about the same as when they viewed articles without a summary paragraph. The summary paragraph made no difference in terms of how much of the story was consumed.

Just over 20 percent of the leading news websites regularly use summary paragraphs with articles.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about article layout here.

Advertising

Eyetrack III tested a variety of ad placements and formats across our various hompages and article-level pages.

The first thing we noticed is that people often ignore ads, but that depends a lot on placement. When they do gaze at an ad, it's usually for only 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. Good placement and the right format can improve those figures.

We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations. Right side ads didn't do as well, and ads at the bottom of the page were seen, typically, by only a small percentage of people.

Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen. We noticed that when an ad was separated from editorial matter by either white space or a rule, the ad received fewer fixations than when there was no such barrier. Ads close to top-of-the-page headlines did well. A banner ad above the homepage flag didn't draw as many fixations as an ad that was below the flag and above editorial content.

Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. On our test pages, text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average.

Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen. Small ads on the right side of homepages typically were seen by only one-third of our testers; the rest never once cast an eye on them. On article pages, "half-page" ads were the most intensely viewed by our test subjects. Yet, they were only seen 38 percent of the time; most people never looked at them. Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text. "Skyscraper" ads (thin verticals running in the left or right column) came in third place.

Reviewing 25 leading news websites, we discovered that there's a preponderance of small banner ads on homepages. And it's exceedingly common to find ads in the right column of news homepages. About half of the 25 sites we reviewed inset ads into article text.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about advertising here.

Larger online images hold the eye longer than smaller images

News homepages typically use templates, many of which employ a predetermined size for a main image. Although the value of using a template-driven design can (and should) be debated, what we learned about photo size in Eyetrack III may be helpful to those who are wondering just how big a spot to leave for images.

Although we learned that most of our test participants did not look at images first, we also observed that images received a significant number of eye fixations. We also learned that the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.

One of our test pages had a postage-stamp sized mug shot that was viewed by 10 percent of our participants. Compare that with an average-sized photo (about 230 pixels wide and deep) that drew gazes from about 70 percent.

We found that images that are at least 210 x 230 pixels in size were viewed by more than half of the testers. Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.

Article-level pages seem to follow suit. Again we found that the larger the image, the more users were drawn to it.

In reviewing 25 news websites, we found that about 20 percent routinely use small images on their homepages. Four out of five sites routinely place their homepage main photo in the upper left.

And here's an interesting research tidbit: We noticed that people often clicked on photos -- even though on our test pages that got them nowhere (and indeed, clicking on photos does nothing on many real news sites).

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about images here.

Text for facts; multimedia graphics for unfamiliar concepts

Overall, we observed that participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text fomat. However new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.

So what does this mean? While overall we did see a slight, although not statistically significant, increase in information recall from text stories, we should note that most of our recall questions were about facts, names, and places. Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text. A step-by-step animation we tested supported this idea.

We also observed that most participants attended to only two forms of media at a time. For example, in one of our testing situations users were presented with audio, still images, and written captions. We observed that they directed their attention to the audio and images. Important information in the photo captions were not read by many.

The bottom line is that the best journalists working in multimedia environments know how to make good choices about the presentation of story information. As demonstrated in this research, some information is best conveyed by the use of good, descriptive writing. Other information is better explained graphically.

Read more on what Eyetrack III says about multimedia comprehension here, and read additional general multimedia observations here.

We've covered some of the highlights in this article, but there's lots more, so please spend some time exploring this website. Use the navigation devices at the top of this page and in the left column.

Elizabeth Carr provided research assistance for this article.