One way that usability experts and professional communication scholars study user interactions on the Web is through the use of eye-tracking. Eye-tracking records and documents users' eye movements as they interact with a Web page. The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools recently released Eyetrack III research results. The results are now available online, and I am including an excerpt from the Web article found at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
All the information in this article is very useful for professional Web designers, but one piece of information found in this survey of users stood out to me, primarily because it is one that designers have understood for a long time: Western users tend to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and place priority on elements accordingly:
