Visitors tune out superfluous pictures
When BNSF Railroad put a photo of a train on its homepage, visitors ignored it.
Moreover, they had trouble finding the top stories they were looking for.
Visitors tune out irrelevant images.
And those images make it harder for visitors to find the information they actually want, according to a 2005 eyetracking study by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne.
What visitors saw
Readers DO look at images that:
- Are related to the content
- Are clear
- Feature approachable people (those smiling and looking at the camera)
- Feature areas of private anatomy
Readers ignore images with little information.
Avoid generic images.
So replace irrelevant graphics with useful ones or white space.
“For example,” Coyne said, “if an article is about a signature meal at a restaurant, say a tuna dish, display a scrumptious-looking picture of the plate of food. Don’t show a generic picture of a spoon and fork, as many sites do.”
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
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Sources: Laura Ruel and Nora Paul, “Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design,” Online Journalism Review, March 13, 2007
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