Eyetrack III - Multimedia Features

Multimedia features reviewed in this report:
•Enrique‘s Journey•Camp Heartland•The Big Picture
•Obesity in America
•Smart Growth
•50 Years of Corvettes
•Saddam‘s Sons
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MORE MULTIMEDIA RESULTS ARTICLES
•Recall & comprehension
•Multimedia observations
MORE EYETRACK III RESULTS
•Overview
•All findings (PDF)
Homepages:
•5 homepage designs
•Eye viewing patterns
•Headlines & blurbs
•Headline size•Font size
•Navigation
•Photos & images•Compact & extended pages
Other findings:
•Advertising
•Article-page design
INDUSTRY REACTION
•Jay Small:With homepages, it‘s polite to stare
•Jeff Glick:When to tell stories with multimedia, text
•Kinsey Wilson:Online ads: Why placement & size matter
Observations on Multimedia Features
As part of the Eyetrack III research, we had test participants view avariety of multimedia editorial features. Each of the 46 people we tested was given the same list of several features and told to look at any they wanted. Then we tracked their eye movements during the 10 minutes they had for this task.
EYETRACK III FINDINGS
This report is one of many from theEyetrack III study of broadband-era news websites.
46 people were tested for one hour each in December 2003 byEyetools Inc. in partnership with thePoynter Institute and theEstlow Center. During the test period, each test subject viewed mock news websites created for research purposes and real-world multimedia news features. Results were published in September 2004.
We didn‘t control the subject matter; we didn‘t control any variables; we didn‘t have a hypothesis about what we might find. Rather, this portion of the test was strictly observational.
We wanted to see if we could spot any patterns that would lead us to better understand how people interact with multimedia editorial content; to spot some multimedia best practices that seemed to engage people; and to give us guidance for future, in-depth eyetracking research on how online users interact with different forms of multimedia content.
The observations we‘ve made in this article are qualitative, as if we had gathered a mini-focus group of people who are not regular readers of a website. (If we had tested regular readers of a website, they might have responded differently.)
The features we selected for this test varied in format and scope. Some were award winners, some were not. They represent a typical cross-section of multimedia features found on news websites.
Not every participant viewed every feature tested, so the sample size for each one is modest.
Here‘s what we observed.
 
Multimedia Story 1:Enrique‘s Journey - LATimes.com
"Enrique‘s Journey" is a Pulitzer Prizing-winning package from the Los Angeles Times, published in the print edition, and also published online with a significant number of multimedia enhancements.

Our Eyetrack III testing of this project suggests that few people saw the multimedia elements in this package, most likely because of the way it was designed.
Nine of our 46 test subjects viewed this multimedia package as part of our testing. Our first clue that they didn‘t become engaged is theheatmap of the main page, below, which shows that the page did not guide visitors‘ eyes in any coherent fashion to key elements of the page. (A heatmap is an aggregate image showing overall eye activity on a webpage. Red-orange areas indicate the most eye activity, blue-black the least.) Four of the nine visited the main Enrique page then backed out without clicking on anything.

Of the nine people who spent time with this package, the average number of seconds spent was only about eight, and it averaged only nine eye fixations per person. Among the nine people viewing the main page of the Web package, only four clicks resulted (from everyone combined).
Below the central art element of the feature‘s main page is a small video window featuring the reporter speaking about the project. Our test subjects ignored this element entirely; not only did they choose not to run the video, they barely even looked at it.
We noticed that with the main page, Eyetracking revealed no common area where people first cast their gaze which suggests there‘s no dominant entrance point.
At the article level (after clicking through from the main page), neither of the two people who viewed an article saw the multimedia options available in the right column; they just read text.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
It‘s important to promote entrance to multimedia elements in ways that provide the user with room to view and/or click. Not to do so means they may never be seen -- not seen then ignored, but rather not noticed at all. With an enterprise package with lots of components, layout is especially important. Designers need to think about how readers will be drawn to a particular element.
Read LATimes.com editor Richard Core‘sreaction to this eyetracking review.
Multimedia story 2:Camp Heartland - Time.com
This stand-alone multimedia feature started with an auto-running introduction. Five out of 46 Eyetrack III participants viewed this project. Three of them watched the intro, and two of them hit the "Skip intro" button.

Most of this feature includes photos in the right side of the window, which are a combination of user-controlled and auto-running. The reader must click an arrow to move to the next photo, but some of the frames are auto-running to show several pictures in succession -- then the reader has to click again to get to the next batch of photos.
Everyone looked at the images, and the typical behavior was to read the text at the left, then look to the photo, back to the text, and back and forth as photos changed.

As you can see from theheatmap image above, most of the eye fixations were on the text. For eye fixations on the photos, as we often found with photos throughout Eyetrack III, fixations tended to be on human faces, and overlap less than on text.
None of our five readers of this page used the small thumbnails to navigate to other "chapters" of the feature. (Note on the heatmap above how few eye fixations landed upon them. A heatmap is an aggregate image showing overall eye activity on a webpage. Red-orange areas indicate the most eye activity, blue-black the least.) After clicking through the first nine photos of the first section, most of them didn‘t realize that there were other chapters. They thought they were "done" with the graphic when, in fact, there was much more available.
An alternative way to continue to the next chapter was to click the arrow after the first group of photos, but only one person figured that out. The "9/9" sequence indicator fooled them into thinking that they were done, when they could have reached the next chapter by clicking the arrow one more time.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
Subtle navigation appears to be challenging for readers. It‘s important to make navigation obvious, because most people don‘t spend much time looking intently at multimedia pages. Small thumbnails don‘t get looked at much, it appears. (We noticed the same thing on MSNBC.com‘s Big Picture feature described below.)
Multimedia story 3:The Big Picture/Oscars - MSNBC.com
MSNBC.com is a news site that‘s long been pushing the envelope with multimedia editorial content and its "The Big Picture" series of features pushes the hardest. The Big Picture combines video, audio, still images, text, interactive quizzes, and background material. An innovative feature is a video narrator who guides you through the features.
We tested The Big Picture Oscars 2003 package. (Note: MSNBC.com changed the template somewhat for Big Picture packages published after the 2003 Oscars package.) Six of our 46 test subjects opted to spend time with this feature.

This multimedia project seemed to engage those who spent time with it. The average time spent viewing it was 189 seconds; on average, people who viewed the feature had 298 eye fixations throughout the viewing period, making it the second-most intently viewed of our eight multimedia features.
The Big Picture Oscars is, upon being launched, an auto-running feature. You can simply sit back and watch as the various segments of the presentation are shown to you. Or you can click on one of the navigation elements on the left side and control where you go and what you see and hear, changing the default order if you wish.
All six viewers of this feature let the auto-run play for at least a little while upon entering the presentation. However, five of the six chose to use their mouse to interact with content, to control its flow.
In terms of where people looked on the page initially, all six people exhibited the same behavior. Within the first seven seconds, everyone looked at the left navigation area and the main content window.
Five of six people looked at the "time remaining" graphic below and to the left of the main content window, as you can see in theheatmap image below. For the various video segments of the feature, the counter gave viewers a quick read on how long the segment would last.

An interesting observation involved the left side of the feature, where there are a series of small icons next to text links to the various sections ("Welcome"; "Vote: Best Actor"; etc.). As you can see from theheatmap above, which aggregates all six participants‘ data across their entire visit to the piece, most of the people (four of the six) did not look at the icons, but only at the text descriptions.
Of the six viewers of this feature, two spent only a short time with it before going elsewhere (less than half a minute); three spent a medium amount of time (from a couple to several minutes); and one spent a lot of time (9 minutes) looking at it and examining most parts of the presentation.
The two who left the feature quickly never visually engaged with the female narrator in the lower right. The rest did look at the narrator, moving their eyes back and forth between the main video/image window and the small narrator area when she was talking.
Of the four people who did look at the narrator, three of them looked only at her face; the other looked at her face and upper body.
Finally, note that on the feature there is a small "Hyundai" sponsor link just above the narrator‘s face. That small, subtle ad received a lot of eye fixations; five of six people looked directly at it. This fits with observationselsewhere in our research that ads in close proximity to often-viewed editorial content also receive lots of direct views.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
The innovative technique of having a video narrator guide viewers through a complicated graphic seems to attract readers. People looked at her and paid attention to her face. Our small sample of viewers opted to control the flow -- bouncing around to specific auto-run segments -- rather than rely solely on the length-of-feature auto-run capability of this multimedia project. While the sample isn‘t big enough to make a sweeping conclusion, our observations do point to the notion that interactivity is important to Web users.
Read MSNBC.com senior producer for broadband productions Ashley Wells‘reaction to this eyetracking review.
Multimedia story 4:Obesity in America - Associated Press
This AP multimedia graphic is simpler than some of the other features we included in this part of the Eyetrack research. It contains a number of interactive charts and infographics outlining the obesity problem in the U.S., presented sequentially (but no photos, slideshows, audio, or video).

One of the first things we noticed was that the navigation element -- text links across the bottom of the feature -- wasn‘t used much, even though most people did look at it. Of 11 out of 46 test subjects who viewed this feature, only two used the navigation. Of those who did not use the navigation, seven of them did look at it, the eyetracker revealed; two people never looked at it. (The alternative to navigating the content of the feature from the bottom links was to click through a series of arrows at the bottom of the screen.)
The visuals of this feature were charts and graphics -- no photographs. As you can see from theheatmap image below, fixations were fairly equal overall between text and graphics, with a slight bias toward graphics.

This feature included several frames of content; you had to click through multiple screens to see everything. Intensity of reading fell off as the feature went on.
Most of the readers looked heavily at both text and graphics. Of the light readers of this feature -- about one-quarter of the group -- the tendency was to skim the graphics and not read the text.
Several frames into the feature was an interactive Food Pyramid graphic; users could click on the various components to get additional information. Six of our group of 11 did get that far into the graphic, but only three of them clicked to reveal the hidden information.
There was also an interactive U.S. map earlier on, which showed obesity rates during different years. The map auto-ran to show changes, then the user could click on a year to see the map change again. Four people clicked on the map after the auto-run feature ended.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
Charts and graphs appear to have eye-pulling power. In fact, among people who did look at them, they drew more eye fixations than most photos tested elsewhere in Eyetrack III. Interactive components of a multimedia graphic may not be overtly obvious to the user, and when they are too subtle, people may overlook an interactive opportunity.
Multimedia story 5:Smart Growth - KQED.com
This multimedia feature takes the form of a play-along graphic. You read some text instructions, then "build" your own community -- using illustrated components like roads, buildings, and parks -- based on land-use choices. At the end of the short game, you receive a score and a page of advice (presented in text).

This game held the attention of all nine of the 46 test subjects who viewed the feature. Every one of them played through to the end.
Six of the nine read most of the text on all the frames of the feature thoroughly. The text blocks were all short, except for the final score-and-advice page. About half the group thoroughly read the final score and advice text; the other half skimmed it.

Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
It would appear that interactive games -- at least short ones with clear instructions -- can hold people‘s attention.
Multimedia story 6:50 Years of Corvettes - NYTimes.com
This multimedia feature is typical of the Web slideshow genre. It features a series of slides of Corvettes through the years, with audio narration by a New York Times automobile correspondent.

Upon loading the page, the audio starts and the feature auto-runs to show several car photos and accompanying captions. The only user-control option is to stop the sound temporarily. Once the feature has run completely through, the user can click thumbnails below the main image pane to review the other cars.
Theheatmap below shows that the main parts of the feature -- the large photo and the accompanying captions (which changed along with the photos) -- were looked at about equally by the six of our 46 test subjects who viewed.

What‘s interesting about this heatmap (which compiles viewing data from this feature‘s entire run-time across all participants who visited it) is that it shows several people clicking on the large photo, as though they expected the click to do something. (You‘ll note that one person -- ID no. 1540 -- not only clicked the photos several times, but also clicked the caption text.) That behavior is quite common, we found.People often click photos, and a minority of people routinely click random points on the page as they look around.
Another interesting observation is that while the audio was running, people tended to read the captions less.
This feature included a banner ad underneath the editorial content, and five of the six viewers looked at the ad.
Overall, however, this feature didn‘t seem to hold viewers. Two left after seeing the first car; two left on the second car; one left on the third. Only one person looked at most of the car photos, and that was by switching between photos via manual control. No one let the feature auto-run in its entirety.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
Auto-run slideshows perhaps should have a user-control option. No one let this auto-run through to completion. We saw a similar desire to control the flow of content in the MSNBC Big Picture feature described above. When there‘s audio narration, as in this feature, there can be too much stimulation when the viewer is expected to listen to the narration, look at a photo, and read a caption. Perhaps it makes sense to build in pauses in the audio to allow for text reading.
Multimedia story 7:Saddam‘s Sons - CBSNews.com
In a fairly small screen footprint, this feature includes lots of content: photo slideshows, video, infographics, maps, and text. Navigation through all the content options occurs by clicking a list of topics from the main page, and from inside pages by a pop-up menu in the upper right.
Eight people in our test pool of 46 viewed this multimedia project.

The majority of pages of this feature included an image or photo slideshow in the main content window, with explanatory text on the right side. Overall, the eyetracker showed that people spent more time looking at the text than the images. Theheatmap image below is typical of what we saw as people viewed this feature, with heaviest eye fixation on the text.

Of the text blocks, many were too long to fit in a single screen and included a scroll bar for further reading. Six of eight people did get to a page where text scrolled, and five of them did scroll to read further at least once. However, in the majority of instances they did not bother to scroll -- rather just reading or skimming the visible text.
Because the overall size of the feature is small, the photographs are of modest size, too (most often 370 x 278 pixels). Perhaps that partly explains why photos weren‘t viewed much and text dominated the eye activity on this feature. The only time photos were looked at more heavily was when people viewed the slideshows, which required clicking through to see a series of images. However, only two people viewed a slideshow.
This feature also included a banner ad at the bottom of the screen. Only two people ever looked at the ad; most concentrated their gaze on the editorial content and never ventured far enough down to look directly at the ad, even for a fraction of a second.
Possible lessons to be learned from this package:
We wonder if the small footprint of this feature and the resulting modest size of the images led to the dominance of text.
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