I had a further look into content strategy after our lecture. I started with an article from the Nielsen Norman group that focuses on how people read online.
To figure out how people read and view webpages online the testing method is by using eyetracking, in the most recent studies zigzag layouts of websites have become more popular. On pages that have cells of content, people view them in a lawn-mower pattern they’ll start at the top left move to the right then drop down to the next row and repeat the pattern. For search results pages the user is more likely to use the pinball pattern instead, which doesn’t really follow a path the gaze just bounces around the page at titles and images.
The article then goes on to talk about the gaze patterns in China to see if it’s any different from the western results. They conducted a recent study of users from Beijing and found that almost every pattern was the same compared to the United States. The only difference was that the pinball pattern didn’t appear as much in China, this id likely due to the search results pages including less visuals than the likes of Google or Bing.
Almost all of the same gaze patterns that were present in 2006 were the same in their 2019 study, they are:
As a result of these findings the article says that “Technology changes quickly, but humans don’t” and that all of the gaze patterns can be attributed to the same reason, that “people don’t want to waste time or effort online”. We should cater our designs to reflect the users wants and needs.
After discussing user personas in this weeks lecture I decided to make my own based on our current autonomous vehicles project. I split it into five sections: Story (user background), needs, goals and a quote from the user expressing what they are looking for. I think that by creating these it will help me figure out what is important to include for the design of my project and im quite happy with how they’ve turned out.
