I recently had the opportunity to witness Eye Tracking research on our websites. This was undertaken at a company called Foolproof in London. Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze ("where we are looking") or the motion of an eye relative to the head. Eye tracking relating to website usage is a method of capturing eye movement relating to web page design, content, layout and it's usage. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product design.
With regards to this particular session you get to sit in a viewing suite, on comfy sofas, while people next door are monitored whilst they conduct a customer journey on your site. Their eye movements are tracked and you can see their monitor in front of you projected onto a big screen. The image below is of this event captured rather badly on my mobile camera (apologies for the terrible quality) Bottom left is the interviewee on a video feed and on the right is a projection of their monitor with eye tracking overlaid in realtime.
It's all very interesting. You do get a real insite into what people genuinely experience in the real world. There were many learnings to be had from this session. Too many to repeat here. One key one for me however, was how users view our '3 Box Wonder page' design. This is a page design we arrived at as an outcome of extensive multivariate tests (see image below). It's an unpopular design here in ecommerce but it performs consistently well in getting customers to convert. The eye tracking finding suggested that the reason it may be successful is that the negative points relating to the product are contained within the 3 stacked boxes to the right. These boxes happen to look like Google adword ads so are almost subconsiously ignored by the visitor. This is not something we had intended by this design but it certainly goes some way to explain why this design is so good at what it does! It also helps to prove the value of eye tracking too.
3Box Wonder...
