Last month, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University put out a new eye-tracking study, focused on differences in eye-movement patterns between single- and two-column web pages.

For some reason, I always read these, and inevitably end up frustrated. Not just because of the standard objections to eye-tracking as a useful methodology, but because out of the 20 of them I've read, it feels like numbers 2-20 haven't added anything substantive – or, more importantly, generalizable – to the information I got in the first one, which taught me about the "F"-shaped eye pattern (later popularized as the "golden triangle").

So this time, I was determined to review some of the secondary literature on these studies (in the form of scanning the first page of Google's search results [note to self: touché]), and see if I could generalize the lessons of eye-tracking studies for myself and people like me.

And when I say generalize, I don't mean come up with a Smashing magazine list of "The Top 276 Things Designers Can Learn from Eye-Tracking Studies" that basically recapitulates the bullet points of all the harvested literature verbatim. I'm talking about getting this down to a set of rules of thumb you can write on the back of a business card.

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