So much has been written about how to do web design: What graphics will attract more people to your site? What navigation schemes make it easiest for people to find what they're looking for? But information architects and designers have struggled to formally measure the effectiveness of one approach over another. Now and are providing some useful evidence.
Researchers at the group have published a study showing that users often read web pages in an F-shaped pattern: Two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. They used eyetracking visualizations to produce heat maps such as the two shown here: This is solid evidence of the importance of content layout on any web page. I found it especially interesting how often a left-hand column is overlooked, relative to content in the center or on the right.
Can we get more evidence? Of course there are lots of things a heat map can't tell you: Is your terminology self-explanatory? And even more worrisome: What information are you not providing, but should be? Information architecture isn't 100% evidence-free, but it could use some more rigor. The highly regarded article explained this very well. They described how they developed the successful Y! pattern library -- but nevertheless could not establish a way to rate patterns based on evidence of their effectiveness.
"We looked at several possible ratings: Importance of adherence, Strength of evidence, and Quality/Usefulness/Clarity. Both “importance of adherence” and “strength of evidence” were borrowed from the standards put together by the National Cancer Institute and available at . (Ed. note: Holy smokes, these guys are trying to do evidence-based web design!) We settled on “importance of adherence” as our only rating. Its purpose is to describe how important it is for a designer to adhere to the pattern when designing Yahoo! products. In a sense, it’s describes, “how important is this behavior to the Yahoo! brand?” We abandoned “strength of evidence” as a rating after consulting with the Design Research team at Yahoo!. The design research group was at a loss for how the patterns could be evaluated against existing evidence (both conducted at Yahoo! and researched on the web) in a systematic and affordable way." Oh well, at least they tried.
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authorUrl : http://www.evidencesoup.com/canopener/2007/06/heat_maps_provi_1.html
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