I had some discussions today about “jazzing up” a home page by adding some graphical links to content.  And it made me wonder - if you want to promote a specific bit of content on your home page, which is more effective - text or graphics?  Are graphics more “jazzy”, or are they overlooked by users experiencing ”banner blindness”?

The Poynter Institute did a eye tracking study, and found that:

...more often than not, briefs or captions got the first eye fixations (definition) when the first page (definition) came up. Then the eyes came back to photos or graphics, sometimes after readers had clicked away to a full article before returning to the first page.

They studied internet news sites, though.  Does this apply to corporate or church sites? User Interface Engineering lists some problems with graphic links in the excerpt from their book, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide:

However, we saw one minor problem with image links: because they don�t change color after the user clicks them, there is no visual cue that they have already been traversed.

In Don Norman’s essay Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design he asks:

So what do you do if you want something to be salient, to stick out? Morkes and Nielsen (1997; Nielsen, 1997) discovered that people read web pages very differently than printed pages: They start at the beginning, but are not apt to get very far. As a result, Morkes and Nielsen urged web designers to follow the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, in which key points and conclusions come first, less important matters and background material last.

But that article is from 1999, almost 5 years old now.  Have users changed?  Does it matter if the target users are young (20’s)?

This thread from WebMasterWorld brings up another issue - what type of link would be of more value to a search engine?  The authors in that thread seem to prefer text.

Finally, here’s a bit of irony on the matter.  The National Cancer Institute provides Research Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines where one of them is Use Text Links:

Guideline: Use text links. Do not use image links.
Comments: Text links generally download faster, are preferred by users, and change colors after being selected.

The ironic part?  The site uses “text as image” links for both the header banner, and the title for each Guideline.

So all in all the general feeling is that text links are more effective, but what I didn’t find was a good “text vs graphics” usability test, where a text links and graphic links were placed in a similiar design, presented to similar users with similar tasks, and tested for success rate.

Anyone know of such a study?