Matrix23 Blog

Here is some useful info on the way people behave when they visit a website

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17954
 
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-heatmap-2.htm
 
These relate specifically to adverts but the general principle applies to any content that people can click on.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001996.shtml

Here’s an excerpt from this research:

There is a direct connection to the thalmus to the amygdala which allows the amygdala to emotionally react to a sensory impulse before the neocortex can evaluate the input, thus when the neocortex does logically evaluate something you may already have that emotional bias worked into the equation, and thus try to justify it as being right…I think this was also mentioned in Blink, but is an interesting point.

 I take this to mean that people often make a subconscious, emotional decision about whether they like something before they start to evaluate it consciously. As a big part of website optimisation is about trust, it raises the question of how to use colour, design, layout, images etc to create a sense of trust that people will pick up on.

This is along the same lines as other eye tracking info I have posted. This software scans an image or a video and creates a heatmap of the way a human’s eyes would scan across the page during the first 5 seconds.

http://www.feng-gui.com/