I believe you have heard about eye tracking study showing some kind of heat map of different shades of color to mark where people spend most of their time on a web page. Google AdSense, for example, has one based on the eye tracking to illustrate where you should put your ad units to get the most out of them.

Seth Godin has just posted an eye-tracking video based on the analysis of Squidoo, courtesy of etre.

In the eye-tracking movie, you can see the little blue dot dancing around the screen.

Seth said that it doesn’t measure peripheral vision, although it is crucial.

I think websurfing is a hunting activity. The eye is looking for anamolies, for things that don’t belong. (That might be why the word anomaly, spelled wrong in the previous sentence, got your focus). Once our peripheral vision confirms that something is familiar, we can ignore it and just worry about the new stuff. Squidoo is stuffed with new stuff (nearly all our visitors are first-time visitors) and so, for example, there’s almost no focus on our Google AdWords. That’s because they’re familiar.

The lesson I learn from this is people don’t read or go through your website linearly. They look for something new and pay attention only to things that are of some unfamiliarity to them.

Simplicity is good when designing a web page, especially if you pay per click like a landing page for a PPC campaign. Landing page for e-mail marketing should be of no different.

Source: Seth’s Blog.