Servage Magazine

Heat maps are powerful information for you as a webmaster. They provide information about what your users look at and which areas of your website attract more attention than others. In this there are default user behavior and expectations combined with your customs website, which influences the users behavior. You have exploit this information about attention to strategically place adds or other important information.

The default user attention

Normal web users tend to over focus on the top and left side of the website – meaning that your header and upper left content gets proportionally more attention than upper right, middle and footer content. You can exploit this default behavior by putting the most important information those areas – like logo, menu, ads.

Custom user attention

You can disturb the normal attention pattern by placing larger attention-catchers outside the default hot-zones of your website. For example directing attention to the right side of the page, by place moving, blinking or other contrasting content. The risk, however, is to disturb and annoy the users’ perception of the website.

Tracking user attention

It’s a good ideas to follow user attention by monitoring where they put their focus. Obviously we can’t follow their eyes, so you don’t know where they look. But using JavaScript you can track exactly what the user does with the mouse – for example hovering over areas of interest, or maybe clicking on non-links, indicating that the user was expecting to be able to click on the given element.

Using this kind of information can greatly improve your website and optimize it against your target audience. Even the best ad or special offer is worthless, if placed outside the users area of attention.