Article: "Eyetracking Web Usability: Images"

<p>I ran across an article by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice about how web-users interact with images:<br>

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1412019</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Depending on the context and types of images, people look at less than half of the images presented to them on average—only 42 percent. And in general, they look at those images for less than two-tenths of a second.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I think this writing/analysis applies and relates to images as part of web-design structure and design as in regular web-pages i.e. words mixed with images, photography blogs etc. I'm sure the stats would be a whole lot different for the kind of web-page/s that is primarily a show case for images like in photo-galleries or web-sites by photographers.</p>

<p>Absolutely. I though it was useful from the perspective of making photos that will garner the most attention in non-photo-gallery uses.</p>

<p>I'm not sure the stats would be significantly different for image-based or gallery Web pages. I think it's useful because it photographers may be thinking more images will cause the viewer to stay longer, when reality suggests since the viewer spends about the same amount of time assessing the content of the Web page, they won't stay that much longer, so more images won't improve the visibility of your images, and even have the opposite effect. The sheer number will cause them to simply choose a few, and a less percentage of the total. Only the photographer or viewer specifically looking for images may stay long enough to view scan most if not all of them. </p>