You’ve heard it. You’ve read it.
An image is supposed to be worth a thousand words.
And, it is… in most of the cases.
In their latest research about eyetracking, Eyetrack III, The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools have proved that images don’t always received more attention than text.
For this study, 46 people were observed for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.
In their overview article about the study’s key findings, Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, Eyetrack III project managers explain that “photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren’t typically the entry point (…) Text rules on the PC screen — both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it“
That’s not to say that content-rich websites (such as college or university websites) should switch to text-only.
“Although we learned that most of our test participants did not look at images first, we also observed that images received a significant number of eye fixations. We also learned that the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it,” add the researchers .
Another of their findings also validates a trend you have probably observed across the Web: the increasing use of friendly faces on websites and web banners.
The study actually confirms that “clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages“.
However, when it comes to advertising, text definitely performs better than images: “text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average”.
