

Horizontal Attention Leans Left - Jakob Nielsen - adnam
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/horizontal-attention.html

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FluidDjango
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.

~~~
tokenadult
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.

~~~
fbailey
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...

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

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sp332
Reminds me of this old website, I think it was mentioned in a Blue Man Group
song: <http://wordsontheleft.com/>

