There is a way the human brain and mind is rhythmically wired to scan its environment or its object of focus . In the design of the eye/brain the creator has a basic default in the way the eye which is attached to the brain scans things. This also applies to the way it scans through a website. An understanding of this will help a digital marketer to design his website to ensure it flows with the rhythmical movement of the eye and also relevant and important information are placed at the eyes’ areas of concentration and other details can then be placed at the other points of the website. With the attention span of human reducing drastically, you must ensure that the designs and concepts are done in a way that at each view of your website all key messages are passed across to the web visitor at the earliest possible time without ambiguity or insufficient information
Researchers and eye-tracking experts have done extensive studies on how people view a website and we can leverage on the outcomes of these studies to design our website. As digital marketing experts our major goal is to get those that visit our website to take the desired action so every relevant insight to do such is a welcome development. We will be evaluating these insights and see the ways we can apply them in our digital marketing and web design services.
Attention Path:
Top Left Corner of your website gets the first attention when users land on your website. Their eye journey starts from that point and begins to migrate from there. A critical evaluation, analysis and study has been done by different organizations like Yahoo, Eyequant and Ponyter Institute and all of them come out with a similar result. This indicates that you need to pay great attention to these their studies.
Eye-tracking technology have tracked how the eyes moves when it lands on a webpage. It has followed the readers eye movement as it reads a page and has identified some critical things that will enhance your website and optimize your conversion.
People quickly scan the page main sections as they land on the page evaluating if the information there is relevant to them. What they see there will determine if they will stay longer on the webpage.
It takes about 3 seconds for them to make a decision to either stay longer on that page or leave website entirely
They make decisions about the page in as little as three seconds. The importance of these knowledge is that your webpage must be standard, beautiful and all relevant information and designs should be of high standard.
If your website has passed the 3 seconds test and the browser decides to stay longer, the contents at the top part of the screen is what they pay their most attention to,
If they make up their mind to proceed with reading the content on your page their eyes moves on a horizontal dimension from left to right corner. As the eyes moves in that rhythm it focuses on the upper left corner of the website
Then it swings to the upper-right of the website.
It’s advisable to put your value proposition on the left hand and also other relevant information on the right hand.it is important to note that although this is a rule of thumb it is not a universal truth. You can begin your website design using the above principle but you can also play around some other patterns like putting your strongest proposition on the right. Then do A & B split testing of that webpage and compared to left to right.
Never forget that your important value proposition should be on your upper screen and not the lower end.
One of the schematic description and experiment that helps to re-emphasize the researches above is the Gutenberg Diagram which is a concept that was developed by Edmund C. Concepts shows the focal point of the eye movement and guides on where to place certain things in your home page. It shows that the primary optical area is the top left of your webpage then followed by what is called strong fallow area. This area is at the top right of your webpage. This is followed by the weak fallow area which is at the bottom left part of the webpage and then the terminal area which is at the bottom right. When a visitor visits your page his/her eyes goes in a Z movement pattern. So you need to know what to place at the different edges of the Z and how to place them. In easy term you visitor starts their journey at the top left which is the starting point of the Z and end their journey at the tail end which is the lower right edge of your web page. So ensure your call to action is at the bottom right page. I mostly prefer to keep it the top right page after the header and the headline. You can also be dynamic about keeping it up or down depending on the reading behavioral pattern of your target market or rather you can do an A and B split testing of whether to level it at up or down.
It is noteworthy to state another important factor that should guide your digital marketing and web design activities ,that factor is that people online don’t read. They scan. It is a universal fact that is applicable among the entire human race. A very important research was conducted in 2008 by the Nielsen Norman Group which shows that people online read about 28% of the text in a webpage at most. On the average they only read 20% of the text that is on a webpage
Another interesting thing on how people read website is that they read it in an F shape format. Eye-tracking experiment that was conducted showed that the reading is in the format of 2 horizontal reading line followed by a vertical one. And this is why it is highly recommended that your value proposition should be at the top while your menu with other relevant contents should either be at the top horizontal plane or on the left vertical place.
