The Lawn Mower Eyetracking Pattern for Scanning Comparison Tables
Summary: Users are likely to methodically scan comparison tables row by row, from right to left and back again.
By Kate Moran
Topics: Eyetracking
On pages with distinct cells of content, people often scan those cells in a
lawn mower pattern: they begin in the top left cell, move to right until the end of the row, then drop down to last cell of the next row and move back to the left until the end of the row; and so on. In our eyetracking research, we observed this pattern on many types of pages and tables (especially zigzag layouts) but most frequently on comparison tables. This article focuses on how the lawn mower pattern applies to comparison tables.