English speakers read from left to right. Hebrew and Arabic text runs from right to left. Japanese characters flow down the page. But how do we look at the homepage of an online news site? We flit, according to an article by the new media commentator Steve Outing. According to eyetracking research among 46 people in San Francisco, the path of vision starts around the top left, moves down, then left, up, diagonally downwards, across to the right, way back over to the left ... If you're losing me, Poynter Online has reproduced the diagram.
More interestingly - for Guardian Unlimited's designers, at least - what happens if you superimpose the eyetracking diagram onto our homepage right now?
The path goes something like this: Guardian logo ... picture of nurse accompanying top story ... Fantasy Football ... Should A-levels be scrapped? ... and so on.
Over at CNN, meanwhile, the Eyetrack model suggests readers look first at the channel's Presidential Showdown Game, then the top headline, a link to the weather, and only then look up to the CNN logo.
Forty-six San Franciscans may not add up to a very representative sample - "it is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population," says Outing, carefully - but for web designers, this makes fascinating reading. Advertisers, too, will note that the average ad gets only half to one-and-a-half second's worth of attention. (I'd guess that that's about the same as a billboard on a major road, though traffic jams will obviously encourage a driver's eyes to wander for longer.)
But there's a great deal here that Outing doesn't have enough space to tackle. Suppose online readers do "follow" this line of vision. Is it instinctive, or is it learned, like the techniques learnt for skimming a familiar newspaper? And should designers work with it, or try to disrupt and confound their readers' expectations?
