EYETRACKING WEB USABILITY

Eyetracking Web Usability is a fascinating book by usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice. It's an easy read chock-full of illustrations, great information and tips for improving websites. After introductory chapters that thoroughly explain eyetracking and the methodology behind the study that became the basis for the book, the authors explore the topics of page layout, navigation, web design elements, images, advertisements and user viewing behavior on the web. Here's just a very small sampling:

• Keep navigation naming conventions clear - don't use internal branding phrases like "offline shopping" when you mean "store"
• Bigger and fewer images are better than more and smaller images, and the ones you do use should be directly related to your content. Don't use small, low-contrast images just to break up text. These kinds of images are ignored.
• Avoid stock photography, and keep portrait backgrounds simple
• Animated and graphic ads are more likely to be ignored than simple text ads
• Ads are also ignored if they stand out too much from the visual design of the page. This has implications for internal promos you want to highlight - make them stand out too much and they'll be treated as ads and ignored