Not that surprising-big bulkly promotional flash boxes are a mostly useless relic of the past…especially ones like this site that never change. People expect new and relevant content presented to them each time they return to a site, and its becoming true for sites that are more transactional and e-commerce based as well.
What I find more interesting here is the nearly complete lack of attention people are paying to the navigation in both of these studies. Users pay attention to the “home” button, because as they look at content on the site they will eventually want to come back home to jump back off to new content…but with all the attention paid in UX designs to making sure there is a deep, exhaustive drop down navigation, the truth is that today’s web site surfers don’t use it.
Thats why you’ve seen sites, like Gawker, have nearly no navigation elements, but instead use content callouts at the top that are fresh and constantly changing to push people around their sites.
via mareen: via sebastianwaters:
The test participant in the top gaze plot fixated a few times within the big empty color block before the content downloaded, then spent the remaining time looking at the rest of the page. This user never looked at the big promotional space after it had rendered. The second user (bottom gaze plot) happened to be looking away from the screen during the 8 seconds when the promotional content downloaded. Thus, the first time he looked at the page he saw it as intended, complete with the entire promo. – Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Website Response Time(via slantback)
Interesting. Bookmark for everyone in our business.
