Dating sites can be a wealth of information for those looking for that special someone. The looking part is being studied by Tobii to determine what men and women spend their time looking at on dating profiles. Tobii in collaboration …

What captures a user’s attention on their screen can play a large part in whether or not they click through to a search engine result. Naturally, that makes finding out where eyeballs go on a SERP vital to their overall search experience, and hence, vital to Google’s strategy.

Google of course obtains this knowledge through extensive eye tracking research. The company has a post up today revealing some findings from their latest efforts in this area.

Google respects simplicity. That’s clear based on the design of their home page (assuming you don’t use iGoogle). It’s changed very little since the beginning. It’s simple, clean, and familiar. A field study from Google into the search habits of users has made it even more clear that simplicity reigns supreme when it comes to search.

What Is Eye Tracking?

If you were specifically looking for the population of the United States, you’d notice the big red numbers in the upper right corner of the US Census Bureau homepage right? Not so fast. A recent eye-tracking study suggests you’ve been trained to ignore things like that.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen dropped a few bombshells in his latest Alert Box usability report. Banner blindness isn’t exactly a new topic – everybody knows by now it exists – but the results of this study suggest that ad network placements aren’t worth a warm pitcher of spit.

Google’s not doing too well in China, and a variety of reasons have been given to explain this poor performance.  But fact is better than conjecture, and eye tracking is a preferred (and interesting) way of obtaining insight into these matters.  So Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss conducted a Google vs. Baidu study.

Baidu Rivalry

It pains me to suggest this, but we must ignore (one of) the teachings of Strunk and White.  We must turn our backs on a number of other writing guides.  And we must break our own habit of writing out numbers as words.

Instead, we should represent numbers with numerals – a recent eye-tracking study suggests that they’re much more likely to capture online readers’ interest.

The attention span of Internet users has been the subject of many studies, most coming to the conclusion that, on average, people only spend a few seconds on any given site. An eye tracking study from Poynter Online, however, reveals that users who go online searching for news actually spend longer amounts of time in consuming content than their offline counterparts.

Clean is better. Eye-tracking studies say so. Web copy should be bulleted, concise, easy. Photos should be informative, not decorative. White space is good. And guys like looking at George Brett’s protective cup.

You weren’t expecting that last part were you?

I wasn’t either. But this post on effective news article design proves it.

Newspapers have had trouble transitioning from print to the Web. They’re used to doing things differently.

You have four seconds to get your site loaded and about one-twentieth of a second to impress the visitor before she flits on like an attention-deficient hummingbird. But before that, you have about one second, in the search results, to get her attention in the first place. And just like the tentative beginnings of most romances, it’s all about what you say, how you look, and where you live.

Microsoft released the results of an eye-tracking study focusing on the impact of search ranking, and more provocatively among industry experts, the impact of informational snippet length on user task performance. The early (and already debated) conclusion is that 1. a top 5 rank, not top 10, is crucial; 2. snippet length has a direct impact on search success.