Facebook is testing out a more personal, “Cocktail Party Effect” style status box on their Home Page (see snapshot here).
This is a no-brainer. As any eye-tracking expert will tell you, mentioning the viewer’s name on your web page will bring their attention to that space.Human eyes & ears naturally disambiguate their names from background noise or objects around them. If you don’t believe me, check out this Eye-tracking study for where users look on Facebook & Google+ profiles from AllThingsDigital.
For a more academic perspective, our eyes filtering the content before us to see what is familiar first (ie. our face, name or event) is similar to The Cocktail party Effect research paper by Barry Arons from MIT Media Lab that investigates how people filter what they hear as well. The conclusion was that auditory communication systems should have user interfaces that take advantage of the ability to simulate familiarity and continuity within one single stream as much as possible.
Connect the dots and that will sound like Facebook’s layout - familiar user picture at the top left, single stream in the center and contextual ads with familiar content based on my interests to the right. Take a look at the eye-tracking results below & the data doesn’t lie.
So, for your website, take a lesson from The Cocktail Effect research & Facebook by:
- providing as much continuity within a single stream as possible
- making secondary content weigh less on the page visually or remove it
- distracting your users with familiar cues like their name to guide the viewer to 1-3 key areas you want them to interact with