Eyetracking a Navigation Bar -- how many elements are read? Well, it depends...

This post was originally posted on February 2, 2005, but upon seeing this analysis, I wanted to take a second try at it. The new and improved version is here.

This right-hand navigation bar was the final motivator that got this blog started. When I first saw it, it wasn't doing so great.

People interacted with this nav differently depending on other page elements.

It was on the (old) San Francisco Police Department website, which, some might say, was "cluttered" before the homepage redesign. I know that context plays a big part in how web elements are viewed, but when I saw it in a follow-up study on the (new) re-designed website, I at first thought it was a completely different right nav!

Old Page Design	New Page Design
Eyetools Heatmaps™ showing group viewing trends on each web page (Eyetools Heatmap Legend)

The behavior on these two identical navs on two different pages was strikingly (and statistically significantly) different: the nav on the new page was clicked by 64% of our test participants as opposed to only 14% on the old website. People looked at the new site's right nav longer, more often, and read more — despite there being no change to the design of the right navigation bar at all.

The moral of the story: A change on one part of the page can impact other, unrelated elements on the page. The right navigation bar was used completely differently on the new re-designed website because the content to the left of it changed.

Comments

[Doug]

It just looks like more attention was paid overall to the site with the new design. Perhaps a site has to look sufficiently interesting to warrant investigating what else is on the site (as listed on the navigation bar). I think the fonts should be a little bigger on the nav bar too. I had to look a little harder just to read it.

[Greg]

Doug, the new site did perform better overall. It's interesting to see the effect of a better design -- Clutter reduces what people look at in this case.

[Jason Coyne]

I would say you need more information to tell what this means, it could certainly be negative or positive.
Positive : your content has improved, and causes people to be more interested in what is on your site as a whole
Negative : people can no longer find what they are looking for, and are forced to search through the nav

[Greg]

Jason, please notice that I never said whether it was good or bad! Ultimately, that's up to the client to decide as it relates to the business goals of the page. However, in this case, it was good — it enabled visitors to quickly locate the specific content they wanted.