Eye Tracking: The 'F' Shaped Pattern

The 'F' shaped pattern

F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school.

According to Nielsen (2006) users tend to focus on the left side of the body of a webpage when reading and fixate very little on information located on the right-hand side. Users maintain this ‘F’ viewing pattern with a few horizontal scans, the first one being longer than the second and a long vertical scan (Figure 1). Implications of this are that users may miss valuable information located on the right-hand side of the page.

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