Sufficient consensus
Eye tracking records fixations and saccades to show what was looked at, in what order and for how long. Heat maps and scan paths made reading behaviour on result pages visible.
It is the source of most of what is known about scanning patterns.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Looking without reading. A fixation on a headline is compatible with understanding it, misreading it, or rejecting it.
- The lab. Laboratory conditions remove the interruption, the time pressure and the second screen that define real reading.
- Learned avoidance. People stop looking at positions where ads usually sit, which makes the position itself a liability.
- What they were looking for. The record shows the path. The reason for the path is reconstructed afterwards.
- Attention as the cheap part. Getting looked at is solvable with design. Being believed is not.
What people actually want to know
- They saw my headline. Did it mean anything to them?
- Which parts of my page are being avoided on purpose?
- Does a heat map tell me what to change, or only what to move?
- Would this still work for someone reading between two meetings?
Attention data answers where. The useful question is why they kept reading, and that has to be asked out loud.
More in human-computer interaction
Search user interfaceThe layout decides how much of your answer a person ever sees.Interactive information retrievalPeople reformulate because they have learned something.Information foragingThe decision to stay is made before the first paragraph is finished.Visual hierarchyMost readers will see four things on your page.SensemakingTen good answers to ten narrow questions can still leave someone unable to decide.Cognitive loadA reader who has to work to follow you has less capacity left for deciding.Usability testingA perfectly usable page can still be the wrong page.