Eye Gaze Pattern & Cognitive Fluency
Franco Falconi
🏆 Strategies to Boost Performance & Growth → Business Development → Brand & Marketing Management → Worldwide Partnerships Co-Creation
Eye Gaze Patterns
Using Eye Gaze Patterns to Identify User Tasks (Shamsi T. Iqbal, Brian P. Bailey)
For difficult tasks users will see at the screen for 70%. Users tend to concentrate in specific areas of the screen.
How users require less energy to perform the task that we need them to complete.
Simple as possible and as quickly possible.
Eye Gaze provides a valuable source of information on the difficulty of the task and what area of the screen the user is focusing their attention on.
Directional CUES
People have the tendency to follow the gaze of others.
Most pages can be optimized by including images that serve like visual cues for what our visitors should look at next.
Think about the specific goals and tasks.
3 Most Common Reading Patterns
F-Pattern
When users first come to our site, they will most likely read our content in an F-shape pattern. Likewise, attention is heavily weighted towards the left side of the screen in browsing and examining search results (in English speaking and reading countries).
NOTE: sometimes users disregard the whole line if the 1st word is not appealing! Then, if they like what they see in the first line, they will proceed along the second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. Finally, they will explore the left side in a vertical movement.
If their initial scanning fulfills their needs, they will move to the second pattern:
Layer cake pattern
They are using a more committed pattern, a layer cake pattern- where they explore horizontal lines quickly to see if the section they chose strikes their interest.
In this CXL study, the heatmap shows users reading the headlines but not the text below.
Spotted Pattern
If the layer cake scan pattern shows that the user is still interested, he/ she will proceed to a spotted pattern- looking for the main ideas.
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So, how can we implement this knowledge for our online writing?
We need to make the text more scannable.
Position the most important text along the F-line breaking
The text into convenient paragraphs; that each line starts with the catchy word.
We recommend utilizing the following elements for better scanning:
Cognitive Fluency
Cognitive fluency is the human tendency to prefer things that are familiar and easy to understand. Our brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about. For marketers this means that the easier to understand your offer is, the more likely people are to buy it.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.
Why people prefer unlimited plans
Understanding and comparing different cell phone plans is a pain and takes too much time. Who wants to spend minutes comparing monthly minutes and text-message limits? So what do people do? They go with the unlimited plan. It’s often not the best value, but it’s easy to understand.
Cell phone companies make the most money from unlimited plans, and they have an extra incentive to make other plans confusing. Plans with a fixed amount of minutes charge high fees for going over our allotted minutes – it’s designed to cause us enough pain that we will switch to a plan with a higher regular fee.
Suggestion: make our offer and pricing as easy to understand as possible.
Hard to read, hard to buy
Make our website easy to read.
When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about.
Norbert Schwarz, a leading fluency researcher, and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.
The same goes for products and purchases. Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues did a study on this called Preference Fluency in Choice. They manipulated the fluency of a product by listing its features in either an easy or hard to read font. Easy to read fonts doubled the number of people willing to purchase the product.
Previous positive experiences matter
Cognitive fluency also explains why we stick with brand and service providers we have used before, why we often order the same thing from the menu – it’s easy. We´ve tried it, it worked, and we don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching alternatives and risking a bad purchase.
As a marketer, this means it’s super important to get that first purchase from a customer. Make our first offer packed with value and as easy as possible to buy. Once they have their first positive buying experience, it’s much easier to get repeat purchases.
That is also why we prefer visiting sites where we instinctively know where everything is at, and we know what actions we’re supposed to take.
Fluency guides our thinking in situations where we have no idea that it is at work, and it affects us in any situation where we weigh information
Cognitive fluency stems from another area of behavior known as The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more times we’re exposed to a stimulus, the more we prefer it.
THE MORE FAMILIAR WE ARE WITH SOMETHING, THE MORE WE LIKE IT.
The more “typical” our website layout, the easier it is for the brain to process it.
make everything as simple as possible.