Talk to us...
Sales:
415.409.9EYE (9393)
Email:
contact@eyetools.com
Posted by
Greg Edwards
on
February 02 2005
Permalink
|
Comments
(4)
Eyetracking a Navigation Bar -- How Many Elements Are Read? Well, It Depends...
A historical note regarding this post
Back in 2005, people were talking about how "important it was to have a blog" and so we started one, writing this first entry you see below, which was originally posted on February 2, 2005. But as we posted it, we realized that we (along with most of the world at the time) didn't have any particularly good idea about how blogs should be written. And so we decided to do "eyetracking analysis" on it (it wasn't yet popularly called "eyetracking heatmapping" back then, since the term "heatmapping" was only used by us with clients and didn't start to grab hold in the marketing world until July of 2005 when Jeanniey Mullen wrote about us in AdAge (thank you, Jeanniey)). You can see the blog entry where we posted the eyetracking results of how people read this entry (which back then didn't have this comment on it, of course). And, if you check out the comments on that blog entry, you will see the original comment and link by Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion that truly launched this blog into the public eye, and resulted in eyetracking becoming a common word and tool in the marketing world. Now, jump back to 2005, and read the blog entry below...
— Greg Edwards, founder, and CTO in 2005, now CEO since 2007
This right-hand navigation bar was the final motivator that got this blog started. When I first saw it, it wasn't doing so great.
It was on the (old) San Francisco Police Department website, which, some might say, was "cluttered" before the homepage redesign. I know that context plays a big part in how web elements are viewed, but when I saw it in a follow-up study on the (new) re-designed website, I at first thought it was a completely different right nav!
| Old Page Design | New Page Design |
|---|---|
|
|
|
Eyetools Heatmaps™ showing group viewing trends on each web page
( Eyetools Heatmap Legend ) |
|
The behavior on these two identical navs on two different pages was strikingly (and statistically significantly) different: the nav on the new page was clicked by 64% of our test participants as opposed to only 14% on the old website. People looked at the new site's right nav longer, more often, and read more — despite there being no change to the design of the right navigation bar at all.
The moral of the story: A change on one part of the page can impact other, unrelated elements on the page. The right navigation bar was used completely differently on the new re-designed website because the content to the left of it changed.
Eyetools, Inc. | blog.eyetools.com |
Subscribe
|
415.409.9EYE (9393)
|
contact@eyetools.com
|
© Eyetools, Inc. 2000 –
2010
Comments
It just looks like more attention was paid overall to the site with the new design. Perhaps a site has to look sufficiently interesting to warrant investigating what else is on the site (as listed on the navigation bar). I think the fonts should be a little bigger on the nav bar too. I had to look a little harder just to read it.
Doug, the new site did perform better overall. It's interesting to see the effect of a better design — clutter reduces what people look at in this case.
I would say you need more information to tell what this means, it could certainly be negative or positive.
Positive : your content has improved, and causes people to be more interested in what is on your site as a whole
Negative : people can no longer find what they are looking for, and are forced to search through the nav
Jason, please notice that I never said whether it was good or bad! Ultimately, that's up to the client to decide as it relates to the business goals of the page. However, in this case, it was good — it enabled visitors to quickly locate the specific content they wanted.