Contents 4
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.
If looking at a result meant judging it, the two columns would move together. From position 2 downward they part.
| Position of the best result | Participants who looked at it | Participants who clicked it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 94 % | 89 % |
| 2 | 94 % | 33 % |
| 4 | 89 % | 17 % |
| 5 | 44 % | 17 % |
| 7 | 39 % | 6 % |
| 8 | 22 % | 0 % |
Guan, Z. and Cutrell, E., An eye tracking study of the effect of target rank on web search, CHI 2007. 18 participants, informational tasks, the best result placed at six positions on the first result page.
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.