Heat Maps and Hot Ads

A co-worker recently passed on an interesting article that displays heat maps and talks about the top 15 facts about how people view websites. 

As you can see in the image below, it's clear that we (in the Western world) still view things from left to right and from top to bottom.




A couple of the more interesting highlights were that text attracts more attention than images do and that smaller text is viewed more than larger text. The reasoning behind this makes sense, but I was still surprised: the larger the content, the more it is viewed as "scanable." The smaller the content is, the more people have to focus their attention on the page. There is clearly a fine line between 'small and interesting' and 'too small and annoying', but this contrasts with the idea that everything should be large, eye-grabbing and heavy-hitting.