What do people see on a web page

Anyone involved in web site design should check out the work done by The Poynter Institute, Estlow center and Eyetools. They created a bunch of web pages and then tracked peoples eyes as they read/ scanned them. 

http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm

Most of the consclusions are fairly intuitive, for example people spend most time on the top left of a page, they spend more time on text than pictures and so on.  Interestingly users spent more time looking at text with small fonts than text with large fonts.  Was that because the text was harder to read? 

One interesting effect was that a horizontal line discouraged readers from looking below the line.  So if a headline is underlined readers were less likely to read the blurb below it.  As headlines are often links this runs counter to the useability advice to stick to standards such as links being underlined. 

A lot of interesting material here.

Bob
Textor