Archives for May 2000

on the whole “what do people look at most” front – and it’s important (to me). I think that the study makes an unnatural and unsupportable distinction between text and graphics per se, at least as far as they are used on the WWW. In the stuff I’ve read, graphics = pictures accompanying the text. But on the web, things don’t work like that. After all, even the most solidly text-based sites have some graphical component – even if it’s just the logo. And even in that case, there’s still the layout of the text to consider – which is a design concern though not necessarily “graphic” design as most people (perhaps incorrectly?) use the term. So – that people don’t tend to concentrate on the pictures doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with more fundamental questions – the ones so many of us spend our time answering.

Further, when you start down that road – and consider that a page isn’t much use at all without some rudimentary (at least) navigational context indications – i.e., the page doesn’t stand alone – then the fact that this is usually done using graphical techniques means that it’s really impossible to separate text from graphics as neatly as all that. So, although the study is interesting, in a way, it’s also pretty marginal, at least to my web practice.