UX isn’t only about understanding and designing for user needs. It’s also about meeting the business requirements of the owner or sponsor who is providing the experience to users. Usually, everyone is happiest when both the user requirements and the business requirements are fulfilled — they complement each other. So, one of the things I’ve spent a lot of time doing is guiding eyeballs, by which I mean using user research to understand, and then optimizing design, to “persuade” users to look where they need to focus to accomplish their tasks — ideally also where the owner/sponsor needs users to look.

Design dictates what users look at, and I have made a study of how people look at elements on a screen so that I can optimize designs to meet both user and business needs.

So much UX research has been published over the years documenting how people “look at things” that designers generally know about things like the “F pattern” of reading web content. Eye tracking studies have been instrumental in building our understanding of what people look at and why on computer screens (I was fortunate enough to work for a company that had an eye tracking lab).