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Eyes On Your Ecommerce Website
By Richard Keir, Sat Dec 10th
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir In a recent article I talked about Google AdSense placementbased on eye-tracking research. However, research by The PoynterInstitute, Eyetools and the Estlow Center for Journalism and NewMedia has a lot to say about more than where to put an AdSenseblock. Designing an eCommerce site is more than making it pretty. Youhave certain desired actions you're looking for from yourvisitors. You have specific things you want to be sure they seeand hopefully act on. Now, there's some research that can guideyour design. Certainly you want your site to look professional,but you want it to do its job as effectively as possible too.
People are surprisingly alike in some of their basic visualbehavior. It's been argued that our evolution ashunter-gatherers has shaped much of our ingrained visualpatterns. Whether you buy that particular argument or not thereare still important commonalities. Typical behavior on initially viewing a site is to do a fastscan of the entire visible screen with short focusing periodsaround the areas that attract attention. First pass tends toinclude headlines, the page logo, photo captions, subheads,links and menu items. And the big hot spot is the upper leftcorner of the screen. I haven't seen any definitive research onwhether these patterns also hold for users with native languagesthat read any way except left to right, but I'm assuming most ofyou are building sites for left-to-right readers. The clear message is that your most important real estate is inthat upper left area and that the lower right (particularly ifit's below the fold) is the least likely to receive muchattention. How you use your words in a headline, paragraph or link can makea huge difference in your success at capturing a visitor'sattention. The concept is called frontloading. Wherever you canmake sure your critical terms appear at the very beginning ofheadlines, links and other text. It's still got to make sense,but the first few words are far more likely to be at leastscanned then the middle or end of a headline or link or theinside of a paragraph. The exact same words can have drastically different capturerates depending on their order. You want to maximize theprobability that the visitor will read a whole headline or linkand then act on it. So put the most significant, enticing wordsfirst - the ones that are the best grabbers and convey thesubject immediately. You don't have a lot of time to mess about. It's been reportedthat a typical surfer may be off your page in well under 14seconds unless something grabs his or her attention fast.Remember the upper-left? You want to do an especially good jobwith headlines, link and text in that area. Dropcaps (where the first capitalized letter in a line is in adifferent, often unusual, font and extends below the normal textbase-line), bolding, font changes and color changes can alsoserve as strong eye-attractors. If you try these techniques youneed to be careful that you don't overuse them (your page willlook like a mess), and it's extremely important that you testwhether or not they're actually doing what you want. Annoying asit may be, running tests is the only way to make sure it's animprovement. Do you use lists? Have you made sure that they're in-line and asclose to the left margin as possible? Don't ever use an outlineformat with multiple indents. People scan down, not across andthey tend to scan close to the left margin. Indent too much andit might as well be invisible. An interesting testing result that I read somewhere said thatsomewhere
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between 10 and 20 percent of site visitors don't evensee centered headlines. Sure they look nice and a lot of sitesuse them, but if they're totally missed by even 3 percent ofyour visitors, you're paying a major price to look good.Suggestion? Put those headlines up against your left margin. This also applies to links. Put those links up against the leftmargin, not inside a paragraph, centered or off to the right.And if you want any clicks on a link, never put it in thatnearly unseen lower right area. Might as well just leave it offyour page. How about indented paragraphs? Now there's a great way to startan argument. Some argue that it attracts the eye, it'sdifferent, few sites use it so you stand out. Others insist thatyou're far better off staying left justified and frontloadingeach paragraph. There's only one way to resolve it for yourself,yeah, run some tests and see what works with your visitors onyour site. The bottom line is that once you get beyond the basics ofplacement, frontloading, and left-justified links and headlines,you need to test if you want to fully maximize the effectivenessof your website design. I wish there were a simpler answer too,but in the end only testing will tell you what works best foryour site. About the author:Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business andprofessional presentations and eCommerce related matters. Visithttp://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com for more informationon eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - andhttp://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com/articles for moreeCommerce articles.
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