Heat Map Testing - How should it affect modern web design?

Question

I'm an in house UI/UX/Web Designer at my company. Before hiring me our company had an enterprise level web consulting firm on retainer that we are "letting go of" soon. We are still using them primarily for feedback at the time until our contract is up.

In the past, and particularly with some current feedback, this firm has referred a good bit to the importance of designing pages for the "F-pattern" that heat map tests have proven users tend to absorb web-contents with.

My question is, how important and relevant are those types of Heat Map Tests to today's web design? The tendency seems that our consultant agency thinks we should "play it safe" and stick to the research. I.E. - build on what is proven.

While that seems sensible, I think it is lacking in logic from the standpoint that the Heat Map Tests and the "F-pattern" come from how users tend to read blocks of text, and not as much with the interface. And indeed, if you see a heat-map image where there is an image in the text, usually the image has a longer dwell spot whether it fits in the "F-pattern" or not.

So should the "F-pattern" dictate site layout and interface design, or does it refer less to overall design and more to content absorption?

Answer 1

My non-actionable hyperbolic opinion is that it's a whole lot of hooey they use to convince you they're doing something useful in exchange for the obscene amount of money they're demanding. The art of composition and most other design principles do not lend themselves well to left-brain analyses, but unfortunately, nobody pays artists $300/hr to talk about their feelings at board meetings, so you end up with these quacks shilling irrelevant statistics the MBAs can pretend to understand instead.

Answer 2

The proof is in the pudding. If the design change increases your sales (or whatever you want the website to do for you) then keep it. It worked. If it doesn't, switch it back.

Answer 3

Unless the site design is a radical departure from a "standard" layout, it's tough to refute the evidence of how people tend to scan the page contents.

I think that going against human nature is a massive losing bet in the long run.

That being said, you should run your own studies on your own design and content. Get real data that you can use to support changing (or not changing) the design.

Answer 4

The benefit of heat map analysis comes from understanding how people read your site. The "F" pattern tells you that English speakers read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Duh. Heat maps will tell you if they can find the navigation controls, or if a side-bar distracts from content.

Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting blog post about how people ignore content when it looks like an ad. The site he studied followed the "F" pattern perfectly and eye tracking data showed people saw the content, but didn't read it--they only scanned the first couple words and decided (wrongly) it was an ad. That would have been tough to figure out without heat maps of the actual site.

Use heat maps as an analytical tool, not as a design principle.