Neilsen has started to track people's eye-movements to explore user experience.

Take a look at one fascinating result (a picture of a web site with areas of user interest indicated in varying intensities of orange)…

The upshot: users tend to scan text more than images, and favor text positioned at the top and the left. Boxed material may be ignored if it resembles an advertisement.

This article got me off on a speculative tangent: How does mouse movement relate to eye movement?

I know for myself that sometimes I stop the cursor and just let my eye roam; other times, my cursor lurks right behind my eye-beam, ready to act.

So what are possible design implications?

The go-it-alone eye-beam is inevitable for designs that simulaneously offer a lot of information (reading nytimes.com, my eyes dart, my hand just scrolls).

However, for more interactive designs (and especially oft-used applications), it could be helpful to encourage the camaraderie of eye and hand:

1) Actions like button presses will be quicker if the cursor is already shadowing the eye-beam.

2) Visual callbacks will be more intuitive if the eye does not have to travel to register them (you press a button, the results play nearby).

Anything else?

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