Packed with examples of eye movements and design potentials

books:

	• Eyetracking Web Usability Jakob Nielsen, Kara Pernice New Riders Press, 2009 - 456 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

superb analysis of web pages

There has been one recent prior book about the use of eyetracking, Eye Tracking Methodology: Theory and Practice. It came out in 2007 and its author spent considerable time explaining the hardware and the usages. The latter included the design of web pages and websites. However the current book by Nielsen and Pernice specialises to this very important case. It does not spend much time on what types of hardware you might need to do your own testing. Instead, it goes into a lot of details about the merits and flaws of web pages, as indicated by studies they made using eyetrackers.

It should be said that almost certainly, somewhere in the bowels of eBay, and probably Amazon and Google, there are eyetracking data. Those websites have a well deserved reputation for scientifically analysing their websites, and no doubt others as well. However, little if any of that research has been publicly released. Unsurprisingly, as this could be regarded as a core competence, to be closely guarded.

So in the absence of such disclosures, this book makes a good alternative. If you do want to run eyetrackers on your website, you still need to find the right hardware, and then use this on test subjects. All of which takes time and money.

A quicker way is to look at the many topics of web page layout that the authors summarise. They analysed many existing webpages, across numerous websites, using humans wearing eyetrackers. Take the recommendations and apply them to your pages. Granted, you cannot directly assess how visitors to the pages will react, but this is the cheapest and quickest way to benefit from the book.

You might think, why do I have to do any of this? Can't I just use test subjects and analyse their surfing on my website? Well one of the first things the book teaches is that that method has its limitations. The web server with its logger only tells which links a user clicks on, and which pages she goes to. For people who run websites, we've all been conditioned to think in such ways, and use such results. But those results cannot distinguish between a user spending a long time on a page because she is reading it, or because she is confused about the options that it offers.

The simplest instance of this is where a page has items that look like buttons, but are not clickable. Perhaps an item has a background colour different from the page's background, and, even worse, has a bevelled appearance, so that it looks like a button. When she tries to click on it, and cannot, it increases the frustration level and the odds that she gets confused and simply abandons the page and the site. This sounds obvious. But the authors provide real life examples of websites that make this elementary mistake.

In response, perhaps you might say that you can install software on the client machines, which your human test subjects use. This software could track the mouse movements, giving you more to analyse. Such code exists, possibly even as free open source. But this is still less [useful] than eyetracking data. After all, if your user just sits there and reads a webpage, then mouse data will be minimal.

The web is indeed held together by links. But an even more basic feature of a webpage is the textual and image content. You want the visitor to read the text and look at the images. So by carefully studying the eyetracking data in the many webpage examples, you can get vital advice about how to optimally layout your own pages.

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A few good take-home points

I was hoping there would be a few ground-breaking discoveries, but the book turned out to be more of reinforcement of what one good usability professional would have assumed already.

1. On websites people do tasks, not just browse around. So design for tasks characteristic of the website at hand and then test for it.

2. A little thing can speak volumes when put in the right spot on the page.

3. Men pay too much attention at other men's crotches.

While, as I said, what I learned from the book didn't come up as a big revelation, one very consoling thing is that, well, if Jakob and Kara thought that's all there's to it for now, that's bound be all there's to it. And as Seth Godin rightfully noted: "...if Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice have something to say about the way the Web works, you should listen."

@emironov

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Packed with examples of eye movements and design potentials

Eyetracking Web Usability is based on one of the largest studies of eyetracking usability and employs usability methodology and eye-tracking technology to analyze 1.45 million user fixations on web sites. Designers and software developers - and libraries catering to them - will find this packed with examples of eye movements and design potentials.

"Eyetracking Web Usability" Rocks

I'm loving Nielsen's New Book, "Eyetracking Web Usability," coauthored with Kara Pernice and published just a few weeks ago. It is precisely the great insight I have come to expect from Nielsen over the years.

I have not been in the usability lab for months (and my husband no longer qualifies as the "average user" because I've made him my guinea pig too many times). "Eye Tracking Web Usability" really satisfies my need to observe user behavior.

Nielsen and Pernice eloquently describe user behavior with four-hundred-thirty-two pages of eyetracking evidence. Maybe I'm just a sucker for heat maps, but I say - Read it!

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Substantive

It's nice to read a marketing book that actually has substance. The majority of them are 99% fluff. The research in this book is ground-breaking and I have already implemented it to improve several websites.

Eyetracking Web Usability is based on one of the largest studies of eyetracking usability in existence. Best-selling author Jakob Nielsen and coauthor Kara Pernice used rigorous usability methodology and eyetracking technology to analyze 1.5 million instances where users look at Web sites to understand how the human eyes interact with design. Their findings will help designers, software developers, writers, editors, product managers, and advertisers understand what people see or don?t see, when they look, and why.

With their comprehensive three-year study, the authors confirmed many known Web design conventions and the book provides additional insights on those standards. They also discovered important new user behaviors that are revealed here for the first time. Using compelling eye gaze plots and heat maps, Nielsen and Pernice guide the reader through hundreds of examples of eye movements, demonstrating why some designs work and others don?t. They also provide valuable advice for page layout, navigation menus, site elements, image selection, and advertising. This book is essential reading for anyone who is serious about doing business on the Web.

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