User Eye Flow on Print vs Web
Print and web and how people view them are of course very different. Even though it’s important to have your branding consistent across your collateral, advertising, website and all other promotional materials, you need to make sure that you are changing your layout based on how people view these pieces differently.
Print Design
In print ads for example, people have only a few seconds to connect with your product/brand and see it as a solution to their problem or a way to satisfy their wants. So not only do you want the ad to be emotional and educational, but you also want to put your brand identity in a place where the consumer can actually see it.
There have been several studies on consumer eye flow and although it is not an exact science, it does provide helpful information and gives a name to the lower right corner. That area has been dubbed as the “Corner of Death” by facial coding expert Dan Hill and you can see by the graph below that it is the second-to-last place the viewer looks.
Image by Neuroscience Marketing
Based on eye-tracking research, Hill says in his book About Face that “the best place is the lower middle part of the page or layout. At that point, the viewer will have engaged emotionally with the leading part of the ad.”
Web Design
There have also been a lot of studies for consumer eye flows on websites and among them all, a few key results are:
- Headlines draw eyes before pictures— This was kind of surprising to me at first but considering consumers are hit with an overload of advertising each day, it makes sense that they might view it as more credible information.
- Consumers scan the first couple of words of a headline— Content is definitely king so this is no surprise and holds true for print design as well. A viewer will read only the first few words/sentences and then decide if they want to keep reading based on their interest level. So each word must be carefully chosen to grab the viewer’s attention, which we have discussed before in a previous post.
- Navigation works best at the top— There is a pretty even split from navigation at the top of the page versus the side and users have become very familiar with interacting with both. At the top of the page however, it can be seen immediately which probably has a huge part into why it seems more effective.
- Short paragraphs are best— Big blocks of text are very daunting to read and will normally get skipped over. Get more information into keeping your copy short, sweet and engaging in our previous blog post.
