Click Here

Overview

Objectives/Goals My goal was to test where people click on a web page by creating a mock news website and instructing the users to click on the first interesting thing they saw, then storing the information in a database and analyzing the results. Methods/Materials Materials: A MacBook computer, Fraise, a text editor, 1&1 web hosting, MySQL database software, Email/Facebook. Methods: I started by creating a simple page that would log information to a database. Then, I downloaded the source code of the WIRED site. I modified the page to log the URL of a link to a database when you clicked any of the links. It wasn't working, so I troubleshooted it, and found out it was a typing error. I created an introduction page, telling people to click the first link they notice on the next page. They would click continue, and it would bring them to my WIRED-alike page. I sent out email asking people to send it out to people they know, and tell them to take my experiment. Over 100 people had done my experiment, so I backed up the database. I analyzed the data, and made graphs. Results I had 108 people do my test, and almost 50% of them clicked in the upper-left. Another 20% clicked on the upper-right sector of the page. This supports my hypothesis, that most people will click on the upper-left sector of the page. The terms "above the fold" and "below the fold" originated with newspapers. They now mean #above or below, respectively, the section of the page that is not visible without scrolling". According to Robert Hoekman, Jr., this is because people are habituated to reading the important articles at the top of the page, and less important ones below the fold. Keeping this in mind, the seven people who scrolled to the bottom of the page are probably outliers, and this could be for a few reasons: Didn#t follow the rules Were using a small screen Were using a very large screen Conclusions/Discussion Most people who read from left to right will click the upper-left link, because it#s naturally where the eye goes when you#re reading. This means that if you#re designing a Web page that has important content, it should go somewhere in the upper-left sector of the page. There are different ways that I could have

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2011 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0708

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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