Uncle Jake Nielsen checks in with a summary of some “heat tracking” studies on websites.

For those of you that haven’t heard about heat tracking, companies like Eyetools have the technology to actually place someone in front of a web page and record where they look.  The results are generated in a “Heatmap” that looks for all the world like a Doppler radar image overlaid on a webpage, with more intense colors indicating where more users looked.

Eyetracking has been around for a bit, but this is the first that I’ve seen any summary-type information from a study of any size.  My first reaction is that it seems to confirm - yet again - that content is king.  Notice how little the “designed elements” (navigation, graphics, etc.) in those examples got any attention.