You may already be familiar with eye tracking, a technology used to conduct marketing and usability tests for websites by examining the vision patterns of users as they view a page... but have you seen it in use? Etre, a company specializing in usability, offers an eye tracking service for clients, and features a video of what eye tracking looks like on-screen. Watching other people's eyeballs flick back and forth made me self-conscious about my eye movement for about five minutes...eugh. But I would be curious to see the results for some big-name sites, as well as for SEOmoz and our clients.
I remember a video I saw back in driver's ed where they use eye tracking on a new driver versus a veteran driver. The kid's eyes are darting all over the road, while the veteran's eyes are focused on the important things. I am sure that this would apply to the web as well.
Etre has retested the Virgin website. See https://www.etre.com/blog/2006/04/virgin_on_successful/
Nice catch SG - The update is showing that folks can pay attention to that middle banner.
Etre is publishing heatmaps and analysis from its eye tracking studies every day this week:
https://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_dixonscouk/
Fantastic Find! The first walkthrough of the Dixons homepage is incredibly valuable.
It's strange that no one paid much attention to the giant "virgin sale - dvds from 4.99" image that is in the top-middle of the page. I wonder if it's because it was large enough that their peripheral vision picked it up, so no one looked at it directly. It could also be that the font was so large and there was so little text that anyone who stared directly at it only spent a short instance reading, so it appeared to have less eye-traffic.
Or it could also be that they just made up the results for the video and made the giant logo in the middle appear to be neglected to make it more interesting.
heh... they thought it was porn... people are now conditioned to be blind to certain words, ugly fonts - and obnixious banners too.
I wonder like Aaron how they do it!
With the head not restrained - I guess they've got to track the position of the head and the position of the eyes. Calibrate when the eyes are looking at the four screen corners etc. Amazing technology...
The crazyegg product looked pretty interesting as well. Useful stuff.
David - how much does this sort of service cost? Couldn't see prices on the site.
Thomas - Don't know the pricing on Etre but Eyetools lists their pricing at $1,000 - $2,500 for a study of the main page of your website, or email, or landing page, etc.
That really is quite inexpensive - Thanks for getting back to me David!
Not sure how they would/could track that. Crazyegg has a new product coming out that I've beta tested that is pretty nice. It has (among other things) a heatmap for tracking clicks.
Don't know why anybody serious about their website wouldn't use this technology. It's fairly inexpensive and provides a wealth of information. Many people who've seen the Eyetools, Enquiro, and Did-it eye tracking study of Google have incorrectly assumed that the "golden triangle" pattern is true for all pages but the above example clearly shows that is not the case.
Man! That would be awesome to see on a few different spam sites! That's pretty cool tech!
G-Man