I've had the pleasure of exchanging emails with the Passionate Analyst's Dylan Lewis about something I mentioned during my presentation at the SF Emetrics Summit. It's my experience that questions don't occur in a vacuum, only answers. Usually, when someone asks a question, there are others with the same question who don't ask. Answering just the one person is kind of answering in a vacuum when there might be so many people asking the same question.
Therefore, I asked Dylan if I could reference him and his query in my blog, and he agreed, and many thanks to him for doing so.
Dylan wrote:
"I had an anthropology/web design question that came up today and thought of you.
You mentioned in your presentation that the eye tracking studies were somewhat flawed because the eye starts and stops when the brain is processing - I looked up your article and found that it starts and stops at the 10 o'clock area.
The piece that I am looking for is the research that supports the idea of thinking while the eye is resting. Did you write an article about this limitation of conclusions from eye tracking studies?"
The exchange follows. My responses are in italics, Dylan's in normal type.
I think you're referencing saccadic eye movement. The eye starts and stops moving when scanning information. It starts and stops because (forgive the mechanistic analogy) the brain's input buffer is full, has finished non-consciously processing the information and needs to download it to the conscious mind for evaluation. Once downloaded, the brain tells the eye "okay, send me more stuff".I'm using "processing" and "evaluation" very loosely. Please understand that.
I think the reference you want is Shared Traits of Great Web Design. You can also find relevant information at KBar's Findings: Recognizing Scenes Like the Brain Does. The latter has links to several other information sources.
We're in the process of writing up what I'm affectionately calling "the research paper from hell" covering about five years of study in how color and color iconography influence people's product perceptions. There's quite a bit of culture-specific information in there, especially about how to encourage the mind-eye-brain system to selectively saccade so that you can pass desired information to the mind. One of the things we do (based on this research) is determine where people are saccading on a webpage so we'll know what they think is worth processing versus what we want them to process, then designing accordingly.
The data supporting eye movement starting and stopping at the 10 o'clock position (Usability Studies 101: Follow the Eye, Usability Studies 101: Landmarks Ahead? and Usability Studies 101: The Hungry Peasant) is both gender and age specific. Was there something specific you wanted to know or do?
Probably more than you wanted to know, huh?
Dylan replied:
It was more than I asked about - and it fit the bill perfectly.
The section on using white space appropriately to optimize for saccadic eye movement explains a lot.
I believe it you said that where the eye rested it wasn't looking at what it rested on, but what it saw just before it rested. That is the meme that I am trying to find in order to better understand eye tracking studies.
In most eye tracking studies I have seen, the big F is the standard result. This would seem to correlate with the 10 o'clock theory (at least for english speaking people who go to eye tracking studies).
Thanks for your lengthy response.
Happy to oblige. I encourage readers of this blog, my IMedia and AllBusiness.com articles to either post questions here or email me. I'm happy to answer what I can.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Conferences:
- XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
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