Usability News recently conducted a study on website usability, with the goal of gathering information on where designers should place logos, search boxes, and ads.

They studied eye movements of people using three well-known newspaper sites - The
Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. Participants in the research were asked to complete a number of very simple tasks on the three sites.

People learned very quickly where advertisements were likely to appear on a site and subsequently ignored those areas of the page when browsing. For example, while people viewed the adverts on the right hand side of the Guardian home page they rarely, if ever, looked to the right hand side of subsequent pages on the Guardian site - they had ‘learned’ that this area was reserved for advertising and therefore not of interest to them.