Kevin’s posterous

Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your webpage.

1. Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to what you might think, the first thing users look at on a website isn’t the images. Most casual users will be coming to your site looking for information, not images, so make sure your website is designed so that the most important parts of your text are what is most prominent.
2. Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page. It shouldn’t be surprising that users look at webpages in this way, as most computer applications are designed with the top left hand side as the main focus. You can do your website a favor by keeping this format in mind when creating a design. Remember, while you want to have a personal style, you have to keep the habits of your readers in mind if you want your site to be successful.
3. Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right. Users were found to generally scan webpages in the shape of an ‘F’. Make sure the important elements of your content are located in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headlines, subheadlines, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read further.
4. Readers ignore banners. Ads may be the bread and butter of your site, but studies have shown that readers largely ignore banner ads, often focusing for only a fraction of a second. If you’re trying to make money from ads, you need to be creative in your ad placement or in the types of ads you have on your site.

Americans' favorite leisure activities are reading, TV-watching and spending time with friends and family - the same top three as in 2004, but with lower percentage of people citing them, according to a Harris Poll, writes MarketingCharts.

Also according to the results of the survey:

• Over one-third (35 percent) cited reading in 2004, but this year that is down to 29 percent.
• TV watching has dropped from 21 percent to 18 percent.
• Spending time with friends and family has dropped from 20 percent to 14 percent.
• Computer activities has risen from 7 percent to 9 percent.
• Going to the movies has dropped from 10 percent to 7 percent.

Biggest Changes

The largest increases in popularity in the past 12 years - since 1995, when this survey was first conducted - are the following:

• Computer activities (not surprisingly) - up seven points, from 2 percent to 9 percent.
• Watching sporting events (up four points)
• Exercise (up three points)
• Crafts (up three points)

The biggest declines in popularity over the last 12 years are in TV-watching (down seven points), sewing/crocheting (down five points), entertaining (down four points) and swimming (down four points).

Hours Working and Available for Leisure

The number of hours spent working (including housekeeping and studying) dropped from a median of 50 hours in 2004 to a median of 45 hours this year - the lowest since 1975, when it was at 43 hours.

The number of hours available for leisure per week has not changed much since 2004. It is now 20 hours; in 2004 it was 19 hours.

About the survey: The Harris Poll was conducted by telephone within the United States between October 16 and 23 among 1,052 adults (age 18 and over). Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region, number of adults in the household, size of place (urbanicity) and number of phone lines in the household were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population.

Source: MarketingVox

Among the key findings of the Accenture Holiday Retail Survey 2007:

• Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) cite advertising as their primary source to learn about holiday products. More than half (55 percent) cite word of mouth. Fewer consumers consult retailer and manufacturer websites (39 percent and 23 percent, respectively).

• Nearly six in 10 respondents (57 percent) said they will set a budget for holiday gift buying before heading to the stores, but about half (51 percent) of respondents said they are likely to overspend their budget.

• More than two-thirds (70 percent) of respondents are concerned about the safety of products made in China:
  • Almost half (48 percent) said they have chosen not to buy items manufactured in China, and 9 percent said they have returned an item made in China.
  • More than a third of respondents (37 percent) said they are unconcerned about where the goods they buy are made.
• When asked what bothers them most about holiday shopping in stores, the greatest number of respondents - 77 percent - cited crowded malls, followed by long lines (65 percent).

• About half of respondents (49 percent) said that gas prices will not affect their holiday spending, but nearly the same amount (45 percent) said they will make fewer shopping trips this year due to gas prices.

Findings regarding 'green' shopping:

• Almost half of respondents (47 percent) said concern for the environment is an important influence on their shopping behavior, and nearly six in 10 (57 percent) said they are willing to spend more on "green" products.

• More consumers seek environmentally friendly products than look for environmentally friendly retailers (60 percent versus 46 percent).
• Some shoppers, however, are influenced by retailers' environmental practices, with 35 percent of respondents saying they are influenced by retailers' recycling programs.

MarketingCharts provides additional findings, including on shoppers' attitute toward 'hot' products and gift cards.

About the study: The web-based survey of 532 U.S. consumers age 18 and older was fielded in November 2007.

...when actions tell the real story.

Karen Hughes spent $900 million of Americans' money to convince the Muslim world that our elected leaders in Washington aren't insane. Worldwide opinion polls say otherwise.

Walmart has probably spent close to the same amount of money trying to convince us it isn't the greediest company in the world. But its actions tell us the real story. Today, it's how Walmart is trying to avoid paying state taxes.

Comcast can say it's "comcastic" all it wants, but when its technicians fall asleep on customers' couches, or grandmothers with a heart condition get so frustrated by the company's inattention they smash up a local office, then no amount of professional PR can mask its dreadful operations.

Hundreds of smaller businesses pay PR firms to spam bloggers with meaningless press releases. That's because they don't know how to tell their own stories with actions, not words. They don't understand that real word of mouth, real PR, is generated at the root levels.

The root levels are the clerks, the sales people, the support staff, the receptionist, the call center people, the on-site technicians and consultants, or the police officers, the clerks at the government offices, or the nurses who take your temperature and blood at the hospital. It's their work that generates real PR.

The best PR comes from the smallest of actions by the root-level people. They smile when they first meet you. They call you by your name. They compliment competitors. They don't blame you for their system's misgivings. When forced to make a decision, they always, always, always do the right thing, even if it's not in the economic or political interests of their employer. They break the rules when it's obvious they must.

That's real PR. It's the total sum of stories people tell about you.

Apple's iPhone is a breakthrough phone, no doubt. But its "soft" keyboard is causing "breaks" all of its own as iPhone users are forced to clean up typos caused by its unconventional keyboard.

Mobile instant-messaging (IM) is growing among IM users, especially teens, according to the second annual AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey, which found 25 percent of respondents send IMs from cell phones, including one in three (32 percent) teens, reports

The proliferation of cell phones with QWERTY keyboards makes it easier to send mobile IMs; also, major instant messaging services let users have incoming IMs forwarded directly to cell phones.

Moreover, IM users instant-message from within their social-networking profiles, the survey found.

Instant messaging is popular not only at home and on-the-go but also at the workplace: More than one in four (27 percent) users say they use instant messaging at work, and half of at-work IM users say instant messaging makes them more productive at work — a 25 percent increase over last year.

The most popular IM service was AIM by AOL, cited by 54 percent of teens and adults surveyed; next was Yahoo's with 41 percent; and Windows Messenger with 35 percent.

MySpace IM was cited by 15 percent (23 percent of teens):

Among other top-line survey findings regarding users of instant messaging:

• Nearly three in four teens (70 percent) and one in four adults (24 percent) send more instant messages than emails.

• Multitasking remains very popular, as IM users tend to engage in multiple online activities while sending instant messages:
• Checking email is the most popular activity among eight in ten adult and teen IM users.
• After email, adult IM users most often conduct online searches (49 percent), while teens say they like to research homework assignments online (57 percent).

• Nearly four in five (79 percent) at-work IM users say they have used instant messaging in the office to take care of personal matters; and 19 percent of IM users say they send more instant messages than emails to their co-workers and colleagues.

Findings about teens and IM use:

• More than half (55 percent) of teen IM users have used instant messaging to get help with their homework - a 17 percent increase over last year.
• 22 percent of teens say they have sent an IM to ask for or accept a date.
• 43 percent of teen IM users say they have used instant messaging to say something they would not say to someone in person. Teenage girls are more likely than boys to do so: nearly half of teenage girls, compared with just over one-third of teenage boys.
• Teens today are more likely to upload photos (42 percent in 2007 vs. 34 percent in 2006) while instant messaging. They are less likely to conduct online research for school (57 percent vs. 63 percent) or update their blog or social profile (33 percent vs. 42 percent) while sending IMs.

About the study: Interviewing for the AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey was conducted online by Knowledge Networks among a national sample of 1,246 instant messaging users, including 836 adults aged 19 and older and 410 teens age 13-18.

Source: MarketingVOX

In the recent book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer makes the case for intuition. Curiously, many assessments of the book took for granted that his arguments, familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, cut against conventional wisdom--that trusting intuition is, in fact, counterintuitive. As one friendly interviewer, casting Gigerenzer as a contrarian, put it: "In modern society, gut thinking has a bad reputation."

Oh, really? Maybe it's true that at some point we all promised our parents that we'd be careful, rational, empirical decision makers, but beyond that, it's not easy to find evidence that ours is a society that frowns on gut thinking. Are the narratives of popular culture dominated by super-rational heroes triumphing over seat-of-the-pants gut-trusting bad guys? Actually, it's just the opposite: From Captain Kirk to Indiana Jones to Rambo to Tony Soprano to the hero of every Western ever made, we're drawn to the character who follows a hunch and wins.

And it's just as true in the business world. Who idolizes the plodding studiers of spreadsheets? Nobody. The most widely celebrated heroes of capitalism are the Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Mark Cuban types--the ones who scorn what the focus groups and the gurus say and follow their superior instincts into the highest possible tax bracket. Even corporate honchos whose success has had much to do with number crunching know that the rest of us look up to those who defy the odds, not those who play them. Did Jack Welch call his first book Notes Regarding Efficiency Gains Related to Six Sigma? No. He called it Jack: Straight From the Gut.

Or consider a pop-culture narrative that is partly about business. The heroine of William Gibson's best-selling 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, is one of the most gut-driven characters ever: Cayce Pollard, a professional cool hunter, hired by corporations because her almost-supernatural instincts for whether, say, a certain logo would catch on in the marketplace trump all data and research. All she has to do is look at it, and she knows.

Amusingly, Pollard has basically become the model for scores of real-life trend spotters who present themselves as golden-gut types--and who seem to have no trouble finding corporate clients who haven't gotten the memo about gut thinking's "bad reputation."

Most of us, then, are quite open to hearing that we should trust our hunches. That's what we do most of the time, anyway. And that's precisely why trust-your-gut arguments are so popular--they're telling us exactly what we want to hear. Exhibit A: Blink, Gladwell's entertaining 2005 best-seller, which draws in part on Gigerenzer's research. Blink is actually pretty careful in its treatment of when gut instincts help us and when they fail us, but it's the bit about trusting your instincts that caught many readers' attention.

After all, like Gigerenzer's book, Blink's arguments were backed by hard data. Now there's the ultimate payoff: rational proof that we can stop worrying about rational proof.

But you're not really surprised to hear that, are you? I bet you knew it all along. I bet you could feel it. In your gut.

AMONG TOP SOCIAL NETWORKS, LINKED-IN was the fastest-growing over the last year, according to October ratings released Wednesday by Nielsen Online.

The site geared toward professional users drew 4.9 million visitors last month, up from 1.7 million a year ago.

Other fast-growing social networks included kiddie site Club Penguin, up 157% to 3.8 million users, and Facebook, more than doubling its audience to 19.5 million in the last year. MySpace remained the top social network with 58.8 million users, up 19% from 2006.

Blogger was the top blog-hosting service in October with 34 million users, followed by WordPress.com (11.4 million) and Six Apart (10.6 million.

Source: Mediapost

Changing consumer habits, driven by the shift from analog to digital media, are revolutionizing the ad industry. But that could spell bad news for agencies, according to a new study by Accenture.

According to 70 industry leaders surveyed by Accenture, agencies have the most to lose in the new order, even more than broadcasters. When asked who would fare worst in the transition to digital advertising, 43 percent said agencies, compared to 33 percent who answered broadcasters. Cable operators were third with 10 percent. No respondents chose search companies or digital ad specialists.