“F” Pattern Scanning of Text and Images in Web Pages

Abstract

This article discusses users' visual scan paths of web pages containing text and/or images while conducting browsing and searching tasks on an e-commerce website. Participants were exposed to two web pages, one image-based and one text-based, and asked to perform either a search or browse task on each. They were also asked to perform a search task for a non-existent category on the image-based page. Results show that users follow a fairly uniform scan path with greater fixations on images above the fold when browsing through image-based pages. Fixation counts dramatically dropped on images close to the fold and below the fold. The users performing the searching task on the image-based page seemed very efficient. They seemed to employ unique and random scan paths to successfully accomplish the search. Nielsen's ‘F’ pattern (2006) was confirmed in both the text-browse and text-search tasks.