Page Layout Can Break Human Rationality: EyeTracking SERPs

We've been spending some time in the lab with the eye tracker (and Scrutinizer!) lately. While the study's not done, we pulled few preliminary pics and found this image showing one of our concepts in the Click Fu video.

Note that we see the often touted F-Pattern of eye gaze on search result pages (SERPs). Also note, we see the 10th results gets more attention than the previous couple resutls. The full click fu exploration of this can be accessed about 1 minute into the 2nd YouTube video excerpt.

The general notion is that a combination of visual salience and simple decision making comparing the last result to clicking next ends up with users clicking more often on position 10 than the position 9 or 8. Check out a couple blog posts from Andy Edmonds for more edification. If you're at SXSW, be sure to catch Andy's "crucial conversation" at 11am on Design Metrics.