Christina Luan over at the Virtual Hosting Blog has put together a must-read list of 23 design lessons learned from eye-tracking studies such as the one put on by Poynter.
Read this list. Love this list. You dare not ignore this list. News sites are often the biggest offenders of this list.
Among the lessons:
Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored. Why? Because users assume they are ads and don’t have the information they need.
Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
People generally scan lower portions of the page. […] Give readers something to latch onto when they’re scanning your page.
Many more here.
And, on an unrelated sidenote, the Audacity 1.3.4 Beta was released with improvements galore. Audacity is the cash-strapped news operation’s audio editor of choice due its many great features and low, low price of “free.”
Hat tip to Download Squad on both items.