Ask the Eyetrackers: First-time and Habitual Readers

Q: I just scanned the site. Nice job. Very thorough. But I'm left wondering if this is representative of a first-time visitor's reading of a page, instead of a regular reader's. Both are important. First-timers need more orientation and clarity of intent in design. But experienced readers aren't going to use the page the same way. They're going to skip a lot of the navigation and get right to the news, wherever it is on the page.

Barry Parr

A: For part of the Eyetrack III testing, we designed mock websites that were based on current-day news sites. So, yes, our test subjects came to these sites as though they were encountering something new -- although the designs looked familiar to what they were used to seeing at real news sites.

What we did see on our test sites' homepages was that upon entry, people often looked to the flag/masthead; on average, this was the second page element viewed. Experienced users of a real news website might behave somewhat differently.

The research team faced a decision: Should we test existing news sites and find regular users of those sites, or create new mock news sites that would be fresh? For reasons of resources, we couldn't do both, but felt that the approach we decided on would be most useful to the industry as a whole.

I'd like to see some eyetracking research conducted on websites' experienced users, but that may be for individual news website publishers to commission -- and not as appropriate for a non-profit journalism institution that serves the entire industry.

Steve Outing, Eyetrack III co-project manager, Poynter senior editor

Back to Ask the Eyetrackers page