If you want someone to look at something, only give them one thing to look at.

As the author of this blog post, I wish I had thought of that line :)

It looks like people aren't ping-ponging around. It seems like the most important factor is location which seem somewhat trivial but is still really interesting in the detail we can get.

The trailer site is a marketing tool and it appears there are certain slots that should be more valuable than others. While some of it is obvious, things like avoiding the left are not.

My guess on why no one looks on the left side is the utilization of the right rail which moves the center zone right and it's distinctive appearance as opposed to the rest of the page probably accounts for why the right rail gets a bit more attention than the left column of posters.

That's just speculation, but it would be cool to remove the right rail, recenter the trailers and see what changes!

Have you concidering that this ping-ponging is actually people doing natural search patterns that they prefer. That they'd rather not be controlled and funnelled when browsing content. The equality this design gives allows you to emulate the old fashion store experience.

It's worth noting that when you're doing multiple significance tests, the threshold for significance goes up dramatically. Naively, if you're doing 20 tests, you should expect one to be statistically significant, even if the null hypothesis is true.

That 3 were statistically significant from a sample of 25 is, itself, not statistically significant and any attempt to explain them defaults back to just-so stories.

An interesting test to run would be to see whether the same outliers held when new movies are added to the page which shift the position of the existing movies.

I didn't understand the point of this post. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the fascinating little tidbits from blogs like OK Cupid's, but I found no tidbits here. Fascinate or educate me, please. :)

Failing to reject the null hypothesis as they did is still a worthwhile result

Apple puts up a lot of foreign language movie trailers. People who view the page a lot and don't enjoy foreign language films might skip them. This might account for some of the results.

One time I complained (aka ranted) to Apple about the movie trailer page, and actually got a response back.

What devices do they use? Technically a good webcam that can detect and track head and eye would do the trick, but I've seen the head gear and other funny setups.