The “Eyes” Have It
April 23rd, 2007 by Murray Raphel
When you are a writer of advertising or marketing material, it’s always worthwhile to see research into how people actually “read” your copy.
Some of the best research into “eye tracking” has been done by Siegfried Vogele, Dean of the Institute for Direct Marketing in Munich, West Germany. His groundbreaking study on how the eye actually reads advertising material was first presented in 1986 at the Montreux International Direct Marketing Symposium.
His conclusions, shown in this visual, are quite interesting and show that people want to know who the letter is from and what the PS contains before they read the body of the letter.
More recently, one of the world’s best usability experts, Jakob Nielsen, showed how the eye takes in copy and visuals on the Internet. This article presents Nielsen’s interesting research, and some of the comments that accompany the article are quite amusing.