Day 1 of the Jacob Nielsen workshops I attended in London last week should have been a 1/2 day session. “If folks pay for a full day, we’d better give them a full day, whether or not we have something to say” seems to have been their thinking for this session. Nonetheless, there were some interesting points raised.

The session was based on a recent eyetracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman group. 232 study participants undertook 50 web-based tasks. Eyetracking technology captured how participants’ eyes moved through the sites as they performed the tasks.

Here are the points I found most interesting:

• Users tend to ignore pictures if they look like ads, or are standard stock images, however their eyes are naturally drawn towards pictures of open faces which look out directly at the user.
• Loading order of elements on a site is important, as people look at each element of a site as it is loading. They also continue to look once they’ve clicked away from a page.
• The more something is promoted with a special logo on a site, even if the information is beneficial to users, they will ignore it - to them, it’s advertising.
• Short, simple and legible menus work best for the user.
• Simple tables help users to easily scan complex content
• Small chunks of text are read more.
• The first paragraph is the only one you can count on users reading. So, best get your message out there!
• Always put numbers as numerical characters on a web page. Users scan the text, numerical characters are more likely to stand out.

Nielsen made an interesting observation on the future of online advertisements. In the study, even advanced users looked at and sometimes clicked on ads returned as part of a search by search engines like google. He wouldn’t say for certain, but he thinks this means there will continue to be a future for ads like google ads.