In other words, the closer a piece of information is to the top of the page, the higher the chance that it will be read. We’ve seen that the content above the fold received most attention (57% of viewing time) the second screenful of content received about a third of that (17% viewing time) the remaining 26% was spread in a long-tail distribution. Google gullibility remains as strong as when we identified this user behavior, 10 years ago.) Even above the fold, attention was focused toward the top of the page - especially with SERPs. (It’s an old truth, but bears repeating: be #1 or #2 on Google, or you hardly exist on the Internet. On SERP, the top half of the first screenful received more than 75% of the viewing time above the fold. More than 65% of the viewing time above the fold was concentrated in the top half of the viewport. If we look only at content above the fold - within the first screenful - the information towards the top of the screen received more attention than the information towards the bottom. People spent disproportionately more time viewing the top 20% of a page. On search-results pages (SERPs), which we did not isolate in the 2010 findings, 47% of the viewing time was spent on the top 20% of the page (and more than 75% in the top 40%) - likely a reflection of users’ tendency to look only at the top results. On general websites, more than 42% of the viewing time fell within the top 20% of the page, and more than 65% of the time was spent in the top 40% of the page. To determine how people divide their fixations across the page (independent of how long the page is), we split the pages into 20% segments (i.e., one-fifth of each page). Understandably, not every page is the same length. The remaining 26% was spent in small increments further down the length of the page.
#Google reader scroll plus#
About 74% of the time was spent in the top two screenfuls of content (the information above the fold plus the screenful immediately below the fold). Content above the fold receives by far the highest share of the viewing time. However, the pattern of a sharp decrease in attention following the fold remains the same in 2018 as in 2010. These findings are quite different from those reported in our 2010 article: there, 80% of the viewing time was made up of fixations above the fold. (This analysis disregards the maximum page length - the result can be due to short page lengths or to people giving up after the first two screenfuls of content.) 74% of the viewing time was spent in the first two screenfuls, up to 2160px. In our most recent study, users spent about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold. We can’t tease apart the relative impact of these two changes, but it doesn’t matter, since both are due to the passage of time, and we can’t undo either one, even if we wanted. Two changes happened between our studies: (a) bigger screens and (b) new web-design trends, with possible adaptations on the side of the users. We compared these recent data with those obtained from our previous eyetracking study on 1024×768 monitors. Our goal was not to analyze individual websites, but rather to characterize the general range of user behaviors. For this study, we focused our analysis on a broad range of user tasks that spanned a variety of pages and industries, including news, ecommerce, blogs, FAQs, and encyclopedic pages. These fixations were from 120 participants, who were part of our recent eyetracking study that involved thousands of sites from a wide range of sectors and industries. To answer that question, we analyzed the x, y coordinates of over 130,000 eye fixations on a 1920×1080 screen. It’s time to ask, again, whether user behavior has changed due to the popularity of these web-design trends. Since 2010, with the advent of responsive design and minimalism, many designers have turned towards long pages (covering several “screenfuls”) with negative space. However, the information above the fold still received most attention: even as recently as 2010, our eyetracking studies showed that 80% of users’ viewing time was spent above the fold. In the beginning, users rarely scrolled vertically but by 1997, as long pages became common, most people learned to scroll. But one user behavior that did change since the early days of the web is the tendency to scroll. People’s behaviors are fairly stable and usability guidelines rarely change over time.
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