More Eyetrack results: Print vs. online heads; more evidence for text ads; keep decks short

More interesting findings from the Eyetrack III study, which tracked eye movements of users on newspaper Web sites:

1. Headlines written for print don't automatically (and in my experience, rarely) translate to the Web: Participants' eyes tended to fix more often and longer on the first word or two of headline links. Developer Adrian Holovaty, quoted in this roundup of experts' comments on the Eyetrack III study by Jay Small, says:

"Here's yet another good reason news sites shouldn't be sucking in headlines automatically from the print product," he said. "Site maintainers should take the time to craft Web-specific headlines -- if only for homepage stories. And publishing systems should allow multiple headlines for a single story, based on the story's context."

Then, further down on the page:

A headline on the Web serves as a call to action, in a different way from print. Heads written to fit print layouts may or may not succeed as Web enticements to click through. When in doubt, rewrite -- and if you do, consider putting the "power words" in front unless it's too awkward.

2. From that same experts' roundup, more proof that text ads trump graphical ads:

[Usability expert Jakob Nielsen:] "Other ad types have registered higher click-through rates in the first few months after they were introduced only to suffer declining performance in later periods," Nielsen said. "Since text ads have been doing well for more than three years now, I now think that they have survived past the novelty stage and that they may be here to stay."

[New media industry researcher Rusty Coats] said text ads work best in the proper context. "Text ads rock on pages where users are already in a 'reading' mode," Coats said. "It's just an extension of their reading experience, whereas blinking tiles are not."

3. In the findings on whether to use blurbs with heads, the conclusion was that blurbs increases reading time and causes users to spend more time throughout the page (where blurbs exist). But it doesn't increase clickthrough vs. headlines only. It just redistributes clickthrough. Further, readers do NOT read the entire blurb. Editors who tend to write lengthy decks (which are repurposed as blurbs) should do well to remember this:

If you're going to use blurbs, remember that the first few words may matter most. Our findings indicate that very few people go to the trouble of reading all of even short blurbs. Most people don't invest much time in deciding whether or not to click through to an article, so keep head/blurb combos succinct.

4. Smaller headlines integrated with blurb text resulted in participants scrolling further down the page.

5. Some interesting comparisons of home pages designed to fit a single screen vs. a traditional longer home page that requires scrolling. Shorter home pages drive users deeper into sites by clicking navigation, whereas traditional longer pages encourage sampling of stories just on the home page.