: How to direct users eyes on a website There is a common principle in photography that a photo should lead the viewer's eyes. This is frequently accomplished with a line that runs across the

@Samaraweera207

Here´s a quick tip: Include an image of a person looking at or pointing to your target object (eg a product, a subscribe button). Here´s an example from an ad, but I´ve seen the same tactic on webpages:


(Source: www.grokdotcom.com/2007/10/04/how-a-pretty-face-can-push-visitors-away/)

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@Sherry646

It is all matter of balance between size, color and alignment. With experience you will know what and when use those tricks to attract attention. Luckily on the website we can track this attention and there are a lot of scientific studies on this matter, for example there are good data in Jakob Nielsen website.

About the Eye tracking I want to say that for a matter of budget, and reality no one is gonna pay for an Eye tracking device, or even use it. (It is already difficult to convince your boss in the office to make few hours of usability testing at any stage of the project...) I personally prefer do usability testing with real people to judge my web design composition. Even if this means take a friend of a person of my family and put them on front of the screen asking question or looking their behaviour.

Eye tracking doesn't tell you if what user are looking they understand what is it or not. If they are frustrated hesitating or just admiring the graphic composition.

A great book that can help you in this is Rocket Surgery Made Easy of Steve Krug

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@Correia448

I can think of two simple ways to direct users' eyes on a website:


Use an obvious numbering on your page elements. You can see this in quite a number of site homepage, or you may refer to this PDF file from a financial website (although I think it's not really a great example).
Use arrows to direct your user's attention. This can be something like a flowchart. I can't think of any online example right now though.

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@Goswami567

As koiyu mentioned in the comment, eye tracking is what you should be after. You can create designs with the intent of leading users along a path, but the only way to really know if you're accomplishing your goals is to do an eye tracking study.

That said, you might find my answer useful for the question, How to draw attention to a specific area of a design? It's not the exact same question, but it's close.

More eye tracking resources:


Eye Tracking: Best Way To Test Rich App Usability
Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study
Eye tracking study reveals 12 website tactics
A StackOverflow question about setting up your own eye tracker with a web cam


Eye tracking services:


GazeHawk
SimpleUsability
UserCentric
UserVision

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