Designing Web Sites - an illustrated introduction'
Users have to be able to quickly grasp the purpose of a website and what it has to offer - otherwise they will just click away to another site.
Research has shown that people tend to be systematic in the way they scan documents. For example, the diagram below shows ways in which people might scan three different websites.
The way people scan web pages
· On the left is an eye-scan of a person scanning from top to bottom and left to right. Since most Western people are taught to read this way, it is not surprising that this is the way we scan. This is one of the reasons that titles and banner are put at the top of pages - that's where most of us look first.
· The centre shows a person scanning the top, and then scanning towards the centre. A person might do this on a page with a title and its major content at the centre of the screen.
· On the right is an eye-scan for three-column web page such as a news service. The readers will try to scan the whole page to get an overview, but their eyes may catch something interesting, in which case they may scan the whole article, before moving on to explore the rest of the page. The FT.com website is an example of this.
Thus, for very practical reasons, the elements of web pages must be laid out in a way that maximises the chances that the user will see them when scanning, and take in enough information to decide whether or not to give them more attention.
Joel Sklar in his book 'Designing Web Sites - an illustrated introduction’ gives the following 'map' showing the areas of importance of the screen. It is a very good guide for those designing web pages.
Not every page can be laid out with the configuration above, but it is a model for the three and four column page websites such as many news sites. The Sklar model reflects the importance of the areas, Sklar's model suggests that the areas he labels as area 1 and area 3 are the most important for content, i.e. the centre and right of the screen.
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