UX - Designing for humans - pt 1 - How humans perceive webpages
The field of view
The human field of vision is quite wide, but in the peripheral areas we are only able to perceive contrasts and light/dark.
Saccades
So to get a detailed picture the eye needs to do several “jumps”, which are called saccades.
The above picture shows which parts of a form on a webpage were fixated by a test user, starting with the green circle and ending at the red one.
What is interesting about this picture is, that there are certain areas that were not fixated (not noticed) at all.
Here are three webpages that have been overlayed with a heatmap that shows where users used to look (red and yellow) and which parts they hardly even noticed (blue and grey).
By analyzing the eye fixations on multiple webpages, researchers noticed that there is a pattern.
The wrap-up
Knowing this, you should:
Leverage the read: Know that you have two lines (plus some) to get the most important information across and layout your content accordingly
Ask yourself: Did they see it? when doing user testing
Make important information & actions stand out