Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations.
Most of the tips below are common sense: people scan web pages rather than read them, people look at the top left corner of the page first, people ignore banner ads, people ignore fancy formating that looks like ads, etc.
But why do people interact with pages in this manner?
The answer should be obvious: web designers have trained visitors to use their sites in a certain way. Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL all format their sites according to the above listed guidelines. Because of this, people expect site names and logos to be a the top left. They expect banner shaped images to be banners and therefore ignorable. They expect sites to look, feel, and function a certain way and they are very frustrated when they don’t.
