Eyetracking Web Usability (eBook)

Eyetracking is a hot new field in user interface design. What better way to explore this growing field than with master usability expert Jakob Nielsen showing the way? Jakob and his coauthor Kara Pernice train thousands of people each year on Web usability, and in this book they demonstrate what can be learned from users' eye paths over a broad variety of Web designs. Readers learn how much a user's goal or task influences the way they read and traverse a Web site, which parts of a page users attend to first, how readers react to advertising and design elements that look like ads, where people look first for common page elements and navigation, how they respond to text, pictures, and multimedia, and so much more. With all this data in place, readers come away with practical and effective information about designing their Web sites.

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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.