Eye-tracking study of users watching talking-head videos online

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen has published his latest alertbox at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html. It is an interesting study of how behave when watching talking-head videos online. In summary, the eyetracking data clearly showed that a talking head was boring, even for 24 seconds.

Main guidelines are:

- Keep it short. Typically, Web videos should be less than a minute long.

- Avoid using video if the content doesn't take advantage of the medium's dynamic nature. i.e. it's better to use video for things that move or otherwise work better on film than they would as a combination of photos and text.

- Web users are easily distracted so keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots. If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.