When It Comes to Homepages, It is Polite to Stare

If it’s your job to design the homepage for a newspaper website, you already deserve sympathy.

The organization chart may show you have one boss. But you know better.

You must drive traffic from that one page to everything else on the site. So everyone else at your company whose job depends on that traffic becomes your boss when design decisions affect his or her interests.

Stalwart news managers expect you to maintain the storied “church/state separation” of journalism and advertising matter. Meanwhile, ambitious sales and marketing managers pepper you with requests for just one more tile here, a few more links there.

Oh, and Circulation asked to move that subscription promo box higher on the page. Features wants to promote a comics survey with an illustration. Did you finish the animated Newspaper In Education teaser yet? How about the odd-shaped logos, selection lists, and search boxes for jobs, cars, and homes?

That one webpage bears all the promotional burdens that would typically be spread through an entire printed edition of your newspaper. Your homepage begins to look as though a dozen designers from different departments each built their own piece. In fact, maybe they did: “Hey, Ma, your friends called from the quilting bee — they’re sewing like crazy but they can’t find the pattern!”

Now come the findings of Eyetrack III research from The Poynter Institute. Marvelous, right? Here’s some new ammunition to help bring the homepage design to a standard somewhere north of “early American minor-league outfield wall.”

But, you ask, whose ammunition is it? How much real firepower does it pack? Whose design objectives does it support?

In short, what good is it?

That depends on whom you ask. I asked people I knew would bring widely varying perspectives to their analysis (see profiles in the accompanying box, Our Homepage Umpires) On some points, these experts came to similar conclusions; on others, they disagreed.

Whether your navigation menus cascade from a left-side bar or run across the top of the page in a compact stripe, their effectiveness makes or breaks your site.

Which nav formats get more notice? Eyetrack III participants noticed and fixated on top navs more often than other placements. And they checked right navs more often than left.

“I’ve read that one reason right-side navigation is better than left-side navigation is because browser scrollbars are typically on the right side of browser windows,” said Adrian Holovaty of World Online, “and having all the navigation widgets on one side of the screen requires less mouse movement.”

Holovaty’s not the only one who’s read that. But before you fire up Dreamweaver and start laying out a right-side nav bar, whoa, Nellie! Others in our expert group say you should think about whether Eyetrack III participants’ fixation on a nav bar is a good thing no matter where you put it.

“I would argue that the more time people spend with the nav bar, the less effective the nav bar is,” said Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design. “If you have to stare at it to figure it out, it must be a bad nav bar.”

Jakob Nielsen was even more adamant. “Having users spend more time on a task is not an indication of a better design, it’s an indication of a worse design,” said Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. “Since people are used to finding the navigation on the left or the top, that’s where it should stay. Instead of forcing users to spend more time on deconstructing your page layout and navigation features, it’s better to have them spend the time on engaging with your content.”

A Picture Paints How Many Words?

Plenty of news Web designers, whether they came from the print side or not, have had the concept of “dominant art” drilled into their heads: big picture + middle of screen = the eye-grabber.

Eyetrack III findings don’t line up with that formula. Participants tended to focus on the dominant headline of a homepage first, not the main photograph or image.

That sounds about right to Nielsen. “This confirms many usability studies over the years, where the text generally determined the majority of users’ actions,” he said. “Pictures are less important, but that doesn’t mean that they should be eliminated, only that they should be seen as supplements to the text.”

In Rusty Coats’ research, however, users tell him a different story.

“This flies against a lot of what I’ve seen in usability tests and other ethnographic/observational research,” said Coats, of MORI Research. “In those tests [we] conducted, photos were the first items on a homepage noticed, even more so when the photograph was dynamic. The biggest complaint we hear from online users is that there is too much text on the page and that they’d prefer seeing more art, even if it’s icon-sized.”

At least one big news site sees usage patterns that align with the Eyetrack findings.

“We estimate the upper-left, or lead spot, on our homepage — which generally has the largest headline — is worth a click-through premium of 50-70 percent over other placements on the page,” said Lisa DeSisto, Boston.com general manager. “The photo we typically run at the top center of our homepage carries a premium, too, but it varies hugely depending on its strength.”

This finding ultimately speaks to the need for compelling wording in primary headlines and strong imagery in primary photographs. Or, if in doubt, play a design trump card: package the lead headline and main image together in a “poster” format, a la MSNBC.com.

Blurring The Lines on Blurbs

Eyetrack III’s bottom line on homepage “blurbs” (a.k.a. “teasers,” “decks” or “readouts”) seems to be that they sometimes get noticed, but usually only under certain complex circumstances, and sometimes at the expense of time users might spend scanning other headlines.

Huh? Just remember this: You can find reasons in the study either to use or not to use blurbs. Our experts’ experiences provide additional context for either choice.

“We’ve found in usability studies that blurbs are only good for main-story treatment and perhaps a feature breakout down-page,” Coats said. “How the blurbs are written — dynamic and catchy vs. dry-bone — has a lot of impact on main-story readership but very little on down-page blurbs. Readers skip over those blurbs like a flat rock on a lake.”

DeSisto’s site team didn’t wait for Eyetrack III to make plans. “We’re in the middle of a modest homepage redesign and during our research we discovered that the content of our headlines and blurbs is too often redundant,” she said. “We are considering eliminating blurbs and just offering headlines.”

With headlines only, Boston.com might ponder another Eyetrack III finding, that participants’ eyes tended to fix more often and longer on the first word or two of headline links.

Holovaty sees that finding as a rationale for some content management tweaks.

“Here’s yet another good reason news sites shouldn’t be sucking in headlines automatically from the print product,” he said. “Site maintainers should take the time to craft Web-specific headlines — if only for homepage stories. And publishing systems should allow multiple headlines for a single story, based on the story’s context.”

Your Ad Here — Call 555-BLIND

Most newspaper sites tend to place banner ads across the very top of pages, and tile or tower ads down the right side, because … well, just because.

But in Eyetrack III, the display ads that participants noticed most ran between site branding and remaining first-screen content, or down the left side. By “noticed most” the researchers mean “saw for about a second and a half, at best.”

That duration may sound insignificant, but as DeSisto notes, low yield is still yield. “At Boston.com, it is essential we offer positions throughout the page because of the sheer volume of pageviews the homepage generates. So while click-through yield on ads below the fold is lower, the overall number of clicks is high because of the volume.”

Only text ads seem to escape banner blindness. But is that just the novelty of the format, Dr. Nielsen?

“Other ad types have registered higher click-through rates in the first few months after they were introduced only to suffer declining performance in later periods,” Nielsen said. “Since text ads have been doing well for more than three years now, I now think that they have survived past the novelty stage and that they may be here to stay.”

Coats said text ads work best in the proper context. “Text ads rock on pages where users are already in a ‘reading’ mode,” Coats said. “It’s just an extension of their reading experience, whereas blinking tiles are not.”

Not Where Eyes Go, But Why

Before taking these findings to heart or attempting to apply them in hopes of making better homepages, note that some of our experts expressed concerns about the overall research methodology and validity of the results.

They mostly admired the fundamentals of the eyetracking method itself. Eyetracking, some said, could enrich data gathered in many other forms of user research.

Their beefs about Eyetrack III, in particular, focused on these other factors.

“Neutered” content: “The big flaw in this study is that it assumes that the actual news has no effect on the reader. But, we all know that isn’t true. And study after study shows that it isn’t true,” said Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. “This is amplified in this particular study because they explicitly ‘chose mostly “evergreen” content that wouldn’t appear dated, rather than deadline news.’ Yet it is that very deadline news that drives people to online news sources on a regular basis.

“I’m having trouble with every finding in this study because the mock-up content was so badly neutered and no controls or measures are reported about the relationship that the users have with the mockup content,” Spool said.

Sample sites: “I think it’s safe to say that most readers of news sites are habitual,” Holovaty said. “If the news site I work for were to participate in such a study, I’d want the sample site to be the actual site, and I’d want some of the subjects to be experienced users of the site. How much of the test subjects’ eye movements were a result of never having seen the test site before?”

Location: “Fifty-one participants in San Francisco? And that’s representative of what?” Coats said. “I would not redesign a news website in Kansas City, Atlanta, or Davenport, Iowa, based on what 51 people said in the ultra-wired, ultra-Web-savvy, ultra-dot-com Bay Area.”

Motivations and reactions: “This data only tells us what people see when they use a site that looks like the test site,” Jacobson said. “It doesn’t tell us if they like the site; if the site is easy or difficult to use; what kind of site they would prefer; or how they would react to a site that is different in appearance.

“I’d prefer to get these questions answered by testing today’s typical models against designs that are much different than current industry standards. Maybe eyetracking plus usability studies is the answer,” he said.

Nielsen extended that thought. “Eyetracking and traditional user testing share one important limitation in being reactive: they can only evaluate designs that already exist,” he said. “Usability evaluation remains a definite necessity since we are very far from having websites that are truly easy to use.

“But we also need to go further to discover features that users will want and that will allow them to do things that are currently not possible,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t just ask people what they want … You can’t even rely on people’s predictions of whether or not they will use a proposed new feature or how much they would be willing to pay for it.”

The research coordinators, Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, acknowledged that Eyetrack III measured what participants looked at, but could not always gather why. That’s why, they reminded, the best uses of and results from eyetracking may be yet to come.

“We could only do so much in this study, which we’ve all along considered to be a preliminary look at broadband-era news websites,” Outing said. “I hope that subsequent eyetracking research, whether done by Poynter or others, can dig deeper and address alternative views that we didn’t have the time or resources to do.”

Until then, in addition to our heartfelt sympathies, homepage designers can still take away some useful nuggets from this research:

• Content compels a glance as much as anything in the designer’s toolbox. You can catch a gaze with a surprising word or phrase (note the “FCUK” example) even downscreen on an ugly page. But even a page full of objects designed precisely to attract attention will draw yawns if the audience finds nothing worthy of holding attention.
  
• Navigation? The only safe thing to say is it’s a bad idea to place primary navigation three screens down. You can take that to the bank.
  
• A headline on the Web serves as a call to action, in a different way from print. Heads written to fit print layouts may or may not succeed as Web enticements to click through. When in doubt, rewrite — and if you do, consider putting the “power words” in front unless it’s too awkward.
  
• With the possible exception of text ads, both Eyetrack III and the Magic 8-Ball seem to offer the same forecast for display advertising on homepages: “Outlook Not Good.” Even as standard formats grow in size, and even as designers try them in new positions on the page, eventually those blinking, flashing commercial messages fade into site visitors’ peripheral vision.

Unless they contain the term “FCUK,” of course. See? Made you look!

[ Add a comment or read comments on Eyetrack homepage design results here ]

Jay Small is the director of product development for Belo Interactive, which runs websites for local newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News and The Providence Journal, and TV stations, including KING in Seattle and KHOU in Houston. He runs a weblog and e-newsletter on Internet design at smallinitiatives.com.