100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

6. People Scan Screens Based on Past Experience and Expectations

Where do people look first on a computer screen? Where do they look next? It depends partially on what they’re doing and expecting. If they read in a language that moves from left to right, then they tend to look at the screen from left to right. If they read from right to left, it is the opposite. However, they don’t start in the topmost corner. Because people have gotten used to the idea that there are things on computer screens that are less relevant to the task at hand, such as logos, blank space, and navigation bars (see Figure 6.1), they tend to look at the center of the screen and avoid the edges.

Figure 6.1. We skip the edges of a screen and move to meaningful information ...