Special to Poynter.org

Preliminary analysis of research conducted by Stanford University and The Poynter Institute indicates that text plays a more important role than graphics as entry points for online news.

Compared with similar research into newspaper reading patterns conducted by Poynter 10 years ago, these latest findings suggest some of the differences between reading from a screen and reading from a printed page.

The earlier study found that readers of print newspapers look first at the lead art element on the page, then move their eyes to the biggest headline on the page.

The Stanford-Poynter study of online readership found readers often fixating first on news briefs or captions. Researchers noticed that readers' eyes then shifted to the photos and graphics on the screen, usually after they had returned to the first page after clicking on a brief to get to the complete article.

The Stanford-Poynter study involved 67 subjects recruited through notices published in the online editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and the St. Petersburg Times. The subjects were experienced and regular users of the web who said they read news online at least three times a week.

To test the text-first pattern they observed in the subjects' reading, the researchers analyzed in detail the front page for every fifth subject for a total of 14 out of the 67 subjects. Seven of the subjects fixated first on text in their reading; four looked first at graphics; three had neither graphics nor photos on the online pages they read.

The study was intended to gather information about readership of online news. Unlike a statistically valid exit poll of voters, for example, this study cannot be used to measure, precisely, the behavior of all readers of online news. But it does enable researchers to draw such general conclusions as the relative importance of text over graphics as entry points among heavy users of online news.

"We are going to further analyze our data to test this preliminary finding," said the study's principal investigator, Marion Lewenstein, professor of communication emerita at Stanford. "Currently, we have analyzed only the front pages called up by every fifth subject. We want to check more pages per subject, and perhaps more subjects, to see if this pattern continues to hold up."

The latest study also found:

• Forty-five percent of the banner ads presented on the subjects' screens were viewed. That's a lower fixation rate than photos (64 percent of the photos were viewed), but higher than the rate for tile ads and promotional icons (22 percent).
• Most subjects used the back button and the scroll bar to navigate through stories. Precise percentages are not yet available in this area. Further research could prove important to designers' decisions about whether online content is best presented on long scrollable pages or on shorter pages that require the user to click to a new page.
• Forty-five percent of the subjects went first to a local newspaper's online edition as they began their online news reading session; 28 percent went to a national site; 8 percent to a specialty site; and 9 percent to a portal.

The subjects' eye movements were tracked by a lightweight, head-mounted device originally developed by the military and later adapted by market researchers.

The study was funded by The Poynter Institute. In addition to Lewenstein, the study was conducted by research associate Greg Edwards, a staff researcher at Stanford and expert in eyetracking; research associate Deborah Tatar, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford; and Andrew DeVigal, a Poynter Fellow and expert in online design.

As the 67 volunteers spent a total of 40 hours surfing their favorite news portal sites, the Stanford-Poynter team computer-recorded their eye movements, screen images, and keyboard activity. A total of 608,063 eye fixations and 24,530 mouse clicks were monitored.

Specially written software captured both eyetracking movements and the content of the website the user was looking at on the computer monitor. Whenever the eye stopped, it was counted as a fixation, and each fixation was overlaid against the website's content.

Part 2 -- More on the Stanford-Poynter Eyetrack study and its implications.

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