Structured pages are scanned by jumping to visual weight

What it is

A grocery feed: every card has an image, a price, an add control, two lines of sell copy. Replay barely walks the grid from the top left. Gaze jumps among large images, red prices and buttons; sell copy is often never visited. That is a scanpath that jumps to visual weight, not a miss. It is the default on this class of page: visit local peaks, then decide whether to drop into body copy. It is a different empirical pattern from line-by-line prose. Expecting a feed to be “read top to bottom” mislabels ordinary jumping as failure.

Why it happens

A structured page offers many separate objects, each with its own peak (image centre, high-contrast price, saturated button). Landing sites are the competition among those peaks: a saccade aims at the strongest yet-unvisited peak in view, not “the next grid cell.” Sell copy is small, low-contrast, sandwiched between image and button, and does not enter round one. People are not walking the 1-2-3 on the artboard. They are walking local maxima on a salience map. Grid alignment can make the spatial distribution of peaks more predictable. It does not turn jumping back into word-by-word reading.

Studying it

Partition the page into image, price, button and copy areas of interest. Report first-fixation share, skip rate (area unvisited in a session), and the transition matrix among areas. The independent variable is which class of object is made a peak (larger image, reddened price, high-chroma button). The dependent is whether transitions still run peak-to-peak rather than in reading order. A long-prose control should yield a different matrix — along lines, few jumps — so you know you measured structured scanning, not a device or task artefact.

Where it stops holding

Change the task and the jump targets change. Price-comparers drive skip rate on the price area down; brand-hunters lock on logos. An empty state or a single result kills peak competition and gaze may finish the only card. An imageless settings list drifts back toward prose strategy. “Structured pages jump by weight” describes an empirical path when objects are many, peaks are many, and the task is browse or pick. It is not destiny of structure as such.

Applying it

• On browse pages, make the task-critical values into peaks: price, availability, out of stock. Do not rely on a second line under the image being scanned.
• Elements you do not want seen first (sponsored marks, side campaigns) must not be peaks on the scale of image or price, or scanning will stop on them.
• Copy that must be read cannot live only “in the card’s reading order.” Under a jumping strategy, ordinal position barely produces visits.
• Check: record an unprompted browse of a feed or workbench, and by object class count what was never looked at. If a task-critical value (stock, expiry) has a high skip rate, make it a peak of its own (size, contrast, position) and record again until skip rate falls. Do not lengthen the unread line.

Related

• Same group: F3.04.1 Text-dense pages show a horizontally decaying scanpath · F3.04.3 Scan patterns change with reading direction and content type
• Nearby: F3.05.1 Flow follows the weight sequence, not positional order · F3.01 Composition of visual weight · F2.08 Card layout
• Search terms: scanpath · visual weight · salience · centre of interest