Eye movement Research on personal homepage of social networking site

Editor's note: This article translates from Mashable, a posting from Nick Zhuo, where you can click here to check out Nick's personal blog. The following is the text:

Eyetrackshop recently released an analysis showing the hotspots of the Personal Information page (Profile page) when it was viewed on major social networking sites.

The study used a webcam to record the eye movement of 30 participants while browsing the personal information pages of various social networking sites (data within 10 seconds of entering the page). The recorded data includes: What is on the page is focused on "care" to, as well as the user browsing the main areas of the page order. The social networking sites surveyed include: Facebook,google+,linkedin,flickr,youtube,klout,reddit,digg,tumblr,twitter,stumbleupon and Pinterest.

Although the number of samples is not enough, the experimental results are hardly perfect. But from the data available, the researchers found that:

1, the Personal Information page's head is very important. In Facebook,klout and Stunbleupon, the avatar is the most attractive place for viewers to see the page.

2. The head of a friend you know will also receive a considerable degree of attention. Viewers will see a picture of your friend's little avatar on the page.

3, the more the content, the greater the attention obtained. This is clearly reflected in Pinterest,digg and Facebook. But it's a little bit better on Twitter and YouTube.

Here are the eyetracking heat maps for each website:

Personal Avatar and the first updated information at the top get the most attention.

This shows the sequence of the testers ' browsing for different regions, usually starting with the intermediate flow of information.

Google +

Although testers spend more time on the Google + page than other social networking sites, their personal avatar images don't get much attention.

Testers have an average of 5.9 seconds in the flow of Google +, slightly longer than Facebook and LinkedIn.