| HOME : TODAY IN JOURNALISM : TODAY'S CENTERPIECE |
|
|
Posted
May 5, 2000
PART
2 By MIKE
WENDLAND Andrew DeVigal didn't expect the groans. A Poynter Fellow and researcher, DeVigal was providing a group of visual journalists with a sneak peek at a new study that tracks reading patterns of online news.
The Stanford-Poynter eyetrack study indicates that it isn't photos or graphics that online readers tend to look at first. It's text. "To say they were skeptical would be an understatement," DeVigal said of his audience of mostly print photographers and graphic designers at a Poynter seminar in February. "It seemed to go against everything they had always assumed, namely that pictures and splashy graphics were the draw." But what may be true on the printed page, as discovered in a 1990 Poynter study called Eyes on the News, is not necessarily true on a computer screen. This week, Poynter and Stanford University released the initial findings of a study of the eye movements of 67 volunteers in St. Petersburg and Chicago. The subjects surfed their favorite news sites while wearing lightweight, head-mounted cameras that fired low level infrared beams into their eyes at the rate of 60 per second. A camera on the computer screen that displayed the websites matched their eye movements to the specific content on the website. Kenny Irby, group leader of Poynter's visual journalism faculty, recalled the reaction to the findings when DeVigal described them during the February seminar. "The group seemed very leery, because the study results strongly indicate that photographs and other images are not primary focal or entry points into the screen," he said. "Personally, it is my view that people do see the images and are scanning them via their peripheral vision, and based on content and interest, then decide to fixate." Steve Outing, who writes about new media for Editor and Publisher magazine, cited the uniqueness of the Internet experience and the limits of technology when asked about the study's findings. "My guess is that this is because photos displayed on a computer screen aren't as large or as high-resolution as in print and thus they don't have the drawing power that they have in print," he said. "For bandwidth reasons, many sites run photos fairly small. And at 72 dpi, they're just not very compelling." Outing also thinks that because photos and graphics viewed on the ’Net take considerably longer than text to display on a computer screen, many users simply opt for the written word. DeVigal discounts bandwidth considerations, noting that the tests were run on fast T1 connections and that the pictures displayed nearly simultaneously with text. Outing still thinks he's right. "It may be that these regular Internet users were simply trained that photos come up slowly online and so, out of habit, they looked for text first," he said. Still, he notes, the findings have clear implications for online designers. Says Outing: "Don't treat photos or graphics online the same as you would for print. An online photo probably needs to be cropped down more tightly than you would crop it for print -- down to its essence. And only powerful, impactful photos should go online, because routine shots are more likely to get lost due to the poor quality of photos viewed on a computer screen." DeVigal says the initial findings will be expanded as the research continues. "There's a tremendous amount of data here, and as new media and the Internet become even more pervasive with broadband, it's going to be even more important that we understand just how it is that readers come to our online products," he said. Part 1: Eyes on the News--Online -- What do the initial findings of The Stanford-Poynter Project indicate? The study, like a similar one for newspaper,s tracked users of online news sites.
Eyetrack Updates: Join the mailing list and get update alerts via e-mail. Fill out the form. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
