…says usability analyst Jakob Nielsen.
Nielsen released the results of his latest eye-tracking study at the Usability Week 2006 Conference. The heat maps made from the eye movements of his test subjects seem to show that their eyes moved in an F-shaped pattern across the page.
This is contrary to the Z-shaped path that humans use to interact with printed documents (or “reverse-Z” among cultures that read right-to-left).
Of course, anything from Nielsen should be taken with a grain of salt… but the results are still quite intriguing. Hopefully, he’ll publish a comprehensive scientific paper on the study; but for now, you can visit his site for an abstract and summary.
One question I want answered is whether this F-shaped pattern is a natural (innate) way that humans interact with online documents, or are web designers forcing this pattern by the way they design their pages? Is the tail wagging the dog? It’s an important question that’s not addressed by Nielsen’s study.
Image credit & copyright: Jakob Nielsen.
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