Research firms Enquiro,
Eyetools,
and Didit
conducted heat-map testing with search engine users that produced fascinating
results about what users see and focus on when engaged in search activity.
The
graphic indicates that users spent the most amount of time focusing their eyes
in the top-left area where shading is the darkest.
This
research study also showed that different physical positioning of on-screen
search results resulted in different user eye-tracking patterns. When viewing a
standard Google results page, users tended to create an “F-shaped” pattern with
their eye movements, focusing first and longest on the upper-left hand corner
of the screen;
Moving
down vertically through the first two or three results; moving across the page
to the first paid page result; moving down another few vertical results; and
then moving across again to the second paid result.
In
May 2008, Google introduced the notion of Universal Search. This was a move
from simply showing the 10 most relevant web pages (now referred to as “10 blue
links”) to showing other types of media, such as videos, images, news results,
and so on, as part of the results in the base search engine. The other search
engines followed suit within a few months, and the industry now refers to this
general concept as Blended Search.
Blended
Search, however, creates more of a chunking effect, where the chunks are around
the various rich media objects, such as images or video. Understandably, users
focus on the image first. Then they look at the text beside it to see whether
it corresponds to the image or video thumbnail (which is shown initially as an
image).
Users’
eyes then tend to move in shorter paths to the side, with the image rather than
the upper-left-corner text as their anchor. Note, however, that this is the
case only when the image is placed above the fold, so that the user can see it
without having to scroll down on the page. Images below the fold do not
influence initial search behaviour until the searcher scrolls down.
