If you have ‘experts’ telling you how to design or write your website, you may be getting a ‘bum steer’.
What prompts me to write to you about this is that my graphic designer recently sent me a link to a blog that purports to ‘prove’ (through the use of eye tracking heat maps) that website visitors ‘don’t read’ ...
The contention is that the ‘old fashioned’ copy intensive format won’t work online, and that the only way to communicate in your website is with bullet points and highlighted key words and short copy.
This ‘proof’ really bothered me until it hit me during the night last night that the “232 test subjects looking at thousands of websites” were being expected to be evaluate random sites with no relevance to their interests.
What prompts me to write to you about this is that my graphic designer recently sent me a link to a blog that purports to ‘prove’ (through the use of eye tracking heat maps) that website visitors ‘don’t read’ ...
The contention is that the ‘old fashioned’ copy intensive format won’t work online, and that the only way to communicate in your website is with bullet points and highlighted key words and short copy.
This ‘proof’ really bothered me until it hit me during the night last night that the “232 test subjects looking at thousands of websites” were being expected to be evaluate random sites with no relevance to their interests.
OF COURSE these test subjects won’t ‘read’ the sites put before them.
It’s like putting a couple of hundred magazines in front of you on subjects that would bore you to death, and then watching your reading patterns! It ain’t going to happen. But put a handful of magazines amongst them that are on your particular passions and interests and I’m sure you’d be reading those line by line. Right?
My take on this? Of course, good clean layout and tightly written copy that encourages reading and scanning is desirable, but it doesn’t ‘prove’ that prospects won’t ‘read’.
It only proves that ‘people’ won’t read sites they have no prospect of being interested in. And really, aren’t we only wanting to talk to prospects?
If you’re interested, the link that purports to ‘prove’ people don’t read websites, (to my mind falsely so), is: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Anyway, I had to get this off my chest!
It’s like putting a couple of hundred magazines in front of you on subjects that would bore you to death, and then watching your reading patterns! It ain’t going to happen. But put a handful of magazines amongst them that are on your particular passions and interests and I’m sure you’d be reading those line by line. Right?
My take on this? Of course, good clean layout and tightly written copy that encourages reading and scanning is desirable, but it doesn’t ‘prove’ that prospects won’t ‘read’.
It only proves that ‘people’ won’t read sites they have no prospect of being interested in. And really, aren’t we only wanting to talk to prospects?
If you’re interested, the link that purports to ‘prove’ people don’t read websites, (to my mind falsely so), is: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Anyway, I had to get this off my chest!
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