Avoid 'brilliant images of fuzzy concepts'

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.

TRAIN WRECK Visitors ignored the train image, then looked around the page before landing on "Top stories," the section they sought. — **TRAIN WRECK** Visitors ignored the train image, then looked around the page before landing on “Top stories,” the section they sought.

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.”