Property Management"Eyetrack" Study Shows Online Readers Favor Text
If you have been designing your Web site with style over substance, you may be making a mistake. According to an independent study performed by the Poynter Institute called "Eyetrack," consumers are proving to behave differently online than they do offline.
According to the study, consumers have one set of behaviors when reading print medium and do just the opposite online in some cases. For example, consumers online tend to look most intently at text in search of meaningful textual information. Offline, readers will typically hop from photo to photo before grazing on the stories.
The research centered on 67 online news consumers representative of three metro areas: Chicago, St. Petersburg, Florida and San Francisco/San Jose which were equipped with tiny video headsets capable of tracking where the subjects looked on the computer screen. Movements were recorded to a database. The subjects were allowed to look at whatever they chose to, including their personal bookmarks.
The subjects viewed a total of 211 unique news sites and 6,000 pages, over an elapsed time period of 40 hours. The average news surfing session was six sites in 34 minutes, and the average number of news sites visited during that time.
Researchers recorded 608,063 "eye fixations," the length of time a subject"s eye focuses on a single point for at least 1 1/10 of a second. That is the length of time it takes for the brain to comprehend the information.
Research is only beginning to unravel the mysteries of the online consumer, but tests such as Eyetrack indicate a few points to consider. At an average of five and a half minutes, Web readers aren"t spending long at one site.
News rules. News briefs were looked at 82% of the time, and the news stories were read 92% of the time. While the test subjects searched immediately for headlines, news briefs and captions, they only looked at photos afterward, and then only at 64% of available photos. Only 22% of graphics registered as "eye fixations." This was in spite of the fact that the surfers were on a high-speed bandwidth and photos and graphics were able to load quickly.
In a surprising counter-trend, the study said that banner ads did well, and were seen 45% of the time by the test subjects.
Although the study tracks the habits of news readers, it is only a short leap to other types of information-rich sites such as those provided by Realtors. What can a Realtor do to make their sites more interesting to viewers? The following list offers some suggestions based on other conclusions of the Eyetrack study.
Add daily real estate news to your site. Readers have been shown to read 75% of the story online and less than 25% of the story in the print medium, so if they go to your site seeking information, they will stay longer and return more often.
Stick to serious text. Although readers appreciate a clever wit, they tend to seek specifics. Save the reader time and deliver the goods.
Use photos wisely. The study concluded that pleasure browsing is less common than specific information seeking and gathering, so photos and graphics may be of less importance than you may think. On-screen photos are generally small, and the typical screen resolution is only 72 dpi, making photos less compelling for online readers. Photos should be high-impact, as readers will ignore routine shots, so crop those head shots tightly. If you have homes on your site, augment the photos with clear, concise, and descriptive text. Remember, it is better to have two or three shots of a single feature than to run a large photo with a lengthy download which may lose resolution on the reader"s screen anyway.
Use headlines and headers to advantage. Introduce new topics with newspaper-like headlines and headers so that the reader can get from one topic to another easily. You can also track which information is most useful to your consumer if the information is divisible.
Watch the grammar. Good writing is important to readers who do not wish to be distracted with poor punctuation, typos and other errors. Ditto for dead links.
Easy navigation rules over content. Readers will actually visit other sites with recognizably poorer content if the navigation is easier. That means, surprise, it"s okay to have your reader scroll in preference to click-through in some cases. Just make sure your content is grouped into effective categories.