Usability II Week 7
This week we finished our assignments on analyzing the results of eye tracking studies. Once a usability study has been conducted that includes eye tracking, the results need to be examined. This is includes looking at the different patterns, shapes, amounts of time and places that a particular user looked on a screen. All of this data then needs to be interpreted to determine the next course of action such as if there needs to be remediation on the site or if the results are as expected and no action needs to be taken.
One of the most common patterns we learned about that emerges when a participant is reading a webpage is the F-shaped pattern. That is: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. There are several consequences of this pattern. Users tend not to read all of the words that are on the screen so sometimes important information can be missed. The first two paragraphs on the page should contain the most important information because that is where a user is most likely to see it and the first word of sub headers, paragraphs and bullets should have an information carrying word. By doing these two things users will have more chance to see the information you want them to read if they are just scanning the page instead of reading all of the words.
