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Horizontal Attention Leans Left - Jakob Nielsen (useit.com)
28 points by _hgt1 on April 6, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



What I can't tell from his research is:

How much are his findings affected by the content-organization of the pages his subjects viewed.

His summary:

"Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable."

I have to wonder also about the prior experience of his subjects: were they (like me) accustomed to surfing many sites where they are accustomed to the right sight of page being filled with ads? I know that I am conditioned to mostly ignore what is on the right because so often it is filled with ads that have little interest to me.


Nielsen is well known for his Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience, which states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Yes, any designer of any one website has to plan for an audience that has already developed habits of viewing on other websites. That's why banner blindness

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

is such an important issue in website design. Don't put ANYTHING on your site that looks like a banner advertisement if you want site viewers actually to see it.


a startup we advised for some time had a registration teaser that looked like a banner ... surprisingly nobody registered... they also had a flashy news section with images, when we changed it to text only the click trough rates doubled...


What his data suggest to me is that people spend most of their time looking at the middle of a standard ~800px browser window.


Reminds me of this old website, I think it was mentioned in a Blue Man Group song: http://wordsontheleft.com/




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