Welcome to the Escape Blog

"People spend millions of dollars developing
these websites," says Randolph Bias, who teaches at the School of
Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Companies would benefit if they tested their sites more before launching them, he says.

Great report By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

Other findings from the report:

• Individuals read Web pages in an "F" pattern.
  They’re more inclined to read longer sentences at the top of a page and
  less and less as they scroll down. That makes the first two words of a
  sentence very important.
• "People are extremely good at screening out
  things and focusing in on a small number of salient page elements,"
  says Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the firm.
• Surfers connect well with images of people
  looking directly at them. It helps if the person in the photo is
  attractive, but not too good looking.
• Photos of people who are clearly professional models are a turnoff. "The person has to be approachable," Pernice Coyne says.
• Images in the middle of a page can present an obstacle course.
• People respond to pictures that provide useful information, not just decoration.
• Consumers will peek at ads in search engines
  as a "secondary thing," Nielsen says, since they usually have specific
  product targets in mind.