E-Media Tidbits

You may have noticed that Poynter has released the Eyetrack III study of Web-user behavior. (I was one of the project managers.) You can read the study yourself, and I hope you will, but here's a "tidbit" worth pulling out. I found it fascinating to realize how often people when viewing news websites click as they move around a page. A tiny minority of people click randomly around a page -- not just on active links, but all over the place. That's just curious. Of more importance, a larger minority of people routinely click on photos even when the images are not active links -- perhaps expecting the click to lead to something, either an accompanying story or a larger version of the photo. You can draw your own conclusions after reading the research results, but this does make me think that websites might want to consider making photos clickable. I like the idea of having photo-clicks consistently lead to larger versions of photos. But some news sites consistently have photo-clicks (on homepages) that lead to articles. Washingtonpost.com does this; article-level photos on that site click to an enlarged view. The research won't tell you what to do with this tidbit -- and neither will I -- but making photos consistently clickable is something worth pondering, I think.