Our eyes don’t read in a continuous steady line, but scan for information and look for patterns in a series of rapid left to right skips and pauses, known as saccadic movement.
In order to read efficiently, you recognise word shapes. As you read, you don’t look at individual characters. Instead your eyes scan the x-heights across the word and your brain compares the shape of the word outline with words in your memory, skipping over unfamiliar wordshapes, but creating comprehension based on the context of the surrounding words.
We do this because reading each individual letter in a word would be too time-consuming. Instead the eye moves and pauses as it looks for familiar patterns along a line of text.
The point where the eye pauses is called a fixation, whilst the regressive movement between points is called a saccade. A sequence of fixations and saccades across a design is called a scanpath. (Generally speaking, the number of fixations and saccades and length of time a reader spends on them indicates the relative readability of a typeface.)
In western society, by habit we start reading top left and finish bottom right, so these two areas of the page assume special significance for placing important information. Dominant fixation points like this are known as ‘hotspots’. Placing important information at these points, for example headlines top left, or calls to action at bottom right, help in the exchange of key information.
Research indicates that the human eye has the tendency to follow the same scanpaths when encountering familiar media, so in this situation a designer can place unexpected details or incongruous imagery in the design to create new hotspots to attract the readers attention.
The practical application of this insight is that careful placement of different content types can help lead the readers eye around a page or screen, create interest and/or understanding and improve the structural hierarchy of the communication.
