How do people use their mouse pointer on a page?

Some colorful Notes on Mousing Behaviors in Menus show us actual visualizations of mouse movements through a web site menu.

If you’re interested in seeing someone display ways to test a user interface with actual recordings of visitor interactions, it’s intriguing.

Another page on the topic, linked to from that one is this PDF - Cheese: Tracking Mouse Movement Activity on Websites, a Tool for User Modeling. Here’s one of the insights from that page that make it interesting:

People use the mouse as a marker when they are looking through a list of links. 30% of the time that pages had lists the mouse pointer was used to read along vertically

. While this does not represent a majority of users, the ability to tell what other options users were considering is fairly high.

So, if you can figure out how people use a mouse pointer on your page, you might be able to figure out what they find interesting on your web page. That can be a valuable piece of knowledge.

Another link from the Mousing Behaviours page, leads to a page from the Software Usability Research Laboratory on Cascading versus Indexed Menu Design. The way you arrange navigation upon a page can have a large impact upon how people feel about your site. How do you like to arrange your links?