F-pattern
The F-pattern is a common eye-scanning path on text-heavy pages: readers sweep across the top, drop down and sweep across a shorter second line, then scan vertically down the left edge — tracing a shape like the letter F. Content outside those bands gets skipped.
Documented by Nielsen Norman Group eye-tracking studies, the F-pattern appears when a page offers little visual hierarchy to guide the eye — so readers fall back to a default scanning habit. It rewards front-loaded lines: the first two or three words of each line carry most of the attention weight.
The fix is not to fight the F but to design against lazy scanning: strong headings, short front-loaded lines, and deliberate focal points that break the pattern where it matters. A word-level attention map (Heatpoints Words Map) shows exactly which opening words get read and which trail off.
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