Useful Articles: Eye Path & Better eCommerce

As a part of a recent project, I had to dust off some of the eye path work I did in the past on eCommerce and landing page conversion. It prompted me to do a little research and seek out some information for those who are just starting out in the space.

Today we’re looking at some articles on how to improve our digital marketing and eCommerce by improving eyepath in our websites. Eyepath refers to how your website visitors’ eyes travel through your website’s content. Eyepath research looks into the user’s eye tracking path and optimizes that path to improve website interaction and revenue.

The F-Shaped Reading Pattern

The Nielsen Norman Group’s eye tracking research studies on how website users interact with content are some of the most frequently cited articles on eyepath and how visitors interact with content. Their research is by no means new, but it’s just as relevant today as it was when it first came out. Key takeaways from their articles are the website users frequently skim website content in an F-shaped pattern. Recommendations include the following:

1. Include the most important points in the first two paragraphs on the page.
2. Use headings and subheadings. Ensure they look more important, and are more visible, than normal text so users may distinguish them quickly.
3. Start headings and subheadings with the words carrying most information: if users see only the first 2 words, they should still get the gist of the following section.
4. Visually group small amounts of related content — for instance, by surrounding them with a border or using a different background.
5. Bold important words and phrases.
6. Take advantage of the different formatting of links, and ensure that links include information-bearing words (instead of generic “go”, “click here” or “more”). This technique also improves accessibility for users who hear links read aloud instead of scanning the content visually.
7. Use bullets and numbers to call out items in a list or process.
8. Cut unnecessary content.

Nielsen Norman’s research is probably one of the most important articles on website user research. Highly recommended reading to get you started on the process to begin optimizing your site content.

A Helpful Rule of Thumb Guide

Also recommended is an article from Salience, “Eye Flow, Attention, and Online Content – The Complete Guide”. Salience’s article is a high-level guide on tackling eye path in your website content. Covering a lot of the principles mentioned in the Nielsen Norman research and supplementing it with additional material on headlines and image use, the article is a useful guide to optimizing eye path

What I Like About the Article

The article is a good general guide on many of the important points to consider when optimizing your pages eye path. Each of the sections includes some useful tips and rules to apply to your own pages. The guide covers:

• F-shape and Z-shape Reading patterns
• Headlines
• Images and Eye Path Direction
• Page Fold Use
• Whitespace

I do wish that the article had more detailed information and was more instructional on the use of these elements, but I understand why they don’t. As a consultancy, they’d be giving away the business if they did. It’s also hard to produce something that will answer everyone’s questions in a single guide.

Questions and Help

I hope these articles and resources help you get started in optimizing your ecommerce performance. If you have questions or are looking for help in optimizing your ecommerce performance, please feel free to contact us.