Poynter ‘EyeTrack: Tablet’ research shows horizontal swiping instinct for photo galleries

Poynter reporting:
Poynter’s “EyeTrack: Tablet” project, the latest in our long tradition of research to understand how readers view news, can now announce some early results: iPad users have an overwhelming instinct to swipe horizontally through a full screen photo gallery, regardless of portrait or landscape orientation.
Our Poynter research team thought this was the case. But we couldn’t say with any certainty until we’d observed about a hundred people in an initial, small slice of the study at multiple sites around the U.S.
This first bit of data helps us make decisions about the much more complex prototype designs that we’ll test in the months ahead.
The swiping gesture is an important component to integrate. Many tablet magazines currently call for users to swipe horizontally between stories and vertically through the actual text of a story. But most photo galleries move horizontally through a single story or topic. This finding supports that approach to photo galleries.
In our test, participants who were given an iPad in landscape orientation swiped horizontally 93% of the time. In portrait, they swiped horizontally 82% of the time. This is statistically significant (p<0.001) evidence for a horizontal inclination and indicates that the swipe direction isn’t just a random behavior.
So that we can release findings as we go, we’re initially testing small elements of behavior like this, one at a time...
 http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/171368/poynter-eyetrack-tablet-research-shows-horizontal-swiping-instinct-for-photo-galleries/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=2967708190-_nb_DB_05-04-2012&utm_medium=email