A recent Eye Tracking Update post detailed the basic anatomy of the eye and the two primary types of vision, foveal and peripheral. To continue the discussion on eye biology and how it relates to eye tracking technology, let’s take a look at the behavior that brings the two together: eye movement. The majority (about 94%) of our vision falls in the peripheral region, which is only good for producing a blurred image of surroundings for detecting movement and contrast. Detailed visual data about surroundings cannot be completely registered by the brain unless it is observed through the foveal region of the visual field, which only constitutes about 6% of our vision. Shifting the foveal region over various points of interest is the reason eyes move.
After decades of producing America’s favorite soup, Campbell’s Soup Co. is ready for a makeover. Although the condensed soups generate more than $1 billion in sales, Campbell’s is investigating ways to generate a 2% increase in sales without raising prices. How is it going to do accomplish this? The Wall Street Journal published an article covering Campbell’s’ strategy to revamp its product labeling by conducting research using neuromarketing, a relatively new approach to market research which evaluates consumers’ physiological responses to marketing and advertising stimuli. Neuromarketing studies incorporate multiple biometrics, such as heart rate, skin moisture, and breathing speed, and can be used to explore unconscious reactions during the shopping experience. Eye tracking technology is also being incorporated into these studies, as certain oculometrics like gaze direction, fixation duration, and pupil size have correlations with mental focus, cognitive processes, and emotional reactions to visual information.
The Internet has changed the way we seek information. Up until the last couple decades, information was found in books or in the minds of those more knowledgeable about a subject than ourselves. But today, if you have a question, you just “Google it.” The seemingly all-knowing Google (or Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc.) is where we go for answers. When you type a query and click the search button, a list of results appears and it is assumed that those on the top of the list are the most relevant. Search engines use complex ranking algorithms, which evaluate a combination of website characteristics like keywords, content quality, linking structure, authority, and a host of other secret ingredients, to present a list of search results ranked from most relevant to least relevant.
The eye is a complex organ consisting of various muscles, tissues, and nerve sensors, which work together to create the phenomenon we know as vision. The ability to see, for those of us who possess the gift of sight, is something we take for granted. It seems simple enough– you open your eyes and voila! You see the world around you; however, it isn’t a magic trick. We write about eyes and vision in just about every article on Eye Tracking Update, but to get a better idea of how eye tracking works, you should understand the biology behind this seemingly effortless ability.
A heavy apparatus that consists of several pieces of metal bolted together, forming a two-foot by two-foot box. Metal legs extending from each of the four corners. A sliding door with a small, pen sized hole. And within this contraption, a restrictive crib that prevents “gross head and body movements.” Doesn’t sound like something you would subject your newborn baby to, does it?
An interesting article popped up recently on a blog written by Tim Boucher, a self-proclaimed college drop-out-turned-researcher/blogger who deals with subjects including biological systems, consciousness, psychology of the mind, and the human experience in general. As a working production assistant on theatrical plays, Boucher has become interested in the idea of the human perceptual system as a sort of theater, and in a recent post he highlighted a few ideas in association with eye tracking.
Driver drowsiness and distraction are serious safety hazards on the road. It only takes a momentary lapse of attention to impair a driver’s responsiveness and reflexes. Analyzing a driver’s state of consciousness and awareness while they are actually behind the wheel is a challenge, especially when using biometric equipment to collect data. The mechanisms for recording biometrics like heart rate, brainwave activity, and eye behavior patterns are often intrusive and distracting themselves, putting the test subject in a dangerous situation. A research and development company that specializes in eye tracking technology, called Eye-Com Corporation, has created the Eye-Com Lab Drive Simulator as a safe testing environment to evaluate the effects of driver drowsiness, fatigue, and inattention.
The best way to describe a new approach to eye tracking being developed at New York City’s Columbia is a method that “looks at the world from someone else’s eyes.” A computer scientist, Shree Nayar, and his colleague, Ko Nashino, have developed a way to not only recreate the image of a person’s surroundings as it is reflected on the surface of their eyeball, but also use this image to identify where the person is actually looking.
Eye tracking as a method of researching web usability has been the main topic of a couple of recent posts on Eye Tracking Update. Covering recommendations about the planning and conduct of web usability research by the consulting and research company, Nielsen and Norman Group, these posts laid the groundwork for this third post, which focuses on how to go about analyzing eye tracking results.
Anyone who reads the news regularly knows that the journalism industry is in the midst of an epic change. Some might say it’s in dire straits, but where there’s trouble, innovators often see opportunity. In recent posts, Eye Tracking Update has focused on tips learned from eye tracking studies that enable designers to make their websites more effective or useful for the viewer. A study we came across lays out tactics for the news industry also derived from eye tracking studies.
The Super Bowl came and went earlier this month and while it may have been a first for the New Orleans Saints, football viewers, as usual, were witness to strings of inventive commercials that broke up the action.
Nowadays connectivity is undeniably convenient, as the Internet has provided a platform for us to use social networking sites to stay in touch, make friends, meet clients, and enlarge our circle. Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook provide business and peer networks that organically grow and expand, providing an endless field of potential friends and clients. But despite the convenience of the friend and contact lists that are part of Web 2.0 culture, it seems the design element of these lists remains inconsistent, varying from site to site as you might expect.
It is no secret that eye tracking is one of the most revealing approaches to evaluating web usability. A viewer’s eye movement behavior as they scan through a webpage or site can tell a lot about how navigable and user friendly the design is. Of course there are other, simpler evaluation tools like monitoring cursor behavior or the Think Aloud Method in which the subjects describe their thought process aloud as they navigate, but eye tracking offers more explicit details about viewing activities.
Sex sells. And it is no surprise that sexual imagery calls our attention more easily than non-sexual content. Put a sexually explicit image on a screen next to a non-sexual image, and you can guess which picture someone is likely to look at.
Behavioral economics is a field that focuses on how social, emotional, and cognitive factors affect how people go about making economic decisions. For example, what makes a person decide to buy something they weren’t originally planning on purchasing? Or, why would someone by a more expensive product over a cheaper one? There are many ways to evaluate these areas of behavioral economics: statistical analysis, consumer questionnaires, or video surveillance, to name a few. An article titled “Behavioral Economics and Eye-Tracking” brings to light a way to use eye tracking as a tool to evaluate shoppers’ behavior (specifically gaze behavior) when making a purchase decision.
With the rapid growth of computer tech, new gadgets in so many hands, and with a vast population online or at least aware of the Internet, there comes a comparable emergence of new terminology. A once quite specific language is entering into everyday vernacular. A post on the blog at Insideria.com discusses two terms brought to light in the past few years, “usability” and “user experience,” which may sound similar in nature, however, are anything but synonymous.
Web usability is a hot topic in the eye tracking industry. This is because eye tracking technology provides researchers studying the usability of a website or software interface with more comprehensive feedback than just thinking out loud, click behavior, or time on page. Having the ability to observe eye movement behaviors is about as close to being in the user’s head as you can get. There is a lot that goes into conducting a usability study with eye tracking and obtaining valuable, constructive results.
I just read an amusing, if not somewhat cynical post from the blog at Think Eyetracking. It’s a fairly negative argument when it comes to the application and technology of eye tracking in general, but it brings about some interesting points that I’ve heard echoed in different eye tracking conversations over the years.
Here at Eye Tracking Update we’re often talking about eye tracking in humans, and thus dealing with humans’ physiological processes of seeing. But as we know, engineers are attempting to design other, less human objects with an ability to “see”, threatening a living organism’s monopoly on sight. Computers now have image tracking features and object recognition technology (see Google’s photo recognition software for an example). What exactly, you might ask, am I talking about here?
In a recent post we touched on another article’s review of 23 important lessons that eye tracking has taught us in regard to website design and usability. They were pretty valid points, and not all of them were mentioned in the original post, so we thought we’d pass on a few more tips… read more…
Right or left. Up or down. Now or later. This or that. Life is filled with endless choices and countless decisions, and in this information age, it’s only getting more difficult to select between options. And a recent study published in the Wesleyan University’s newsletter, Andrea Patalano, Associate Professor of Psychology, and Barbara Juhasz, Assistant Professor of Psychology, used eye tracking technology to study how individuals make decisions. Their theory? To determine the difference between a decisive and indecisive person, their eye movements need to be followed.
Here at Eye Tracking update we’re often talking about lessons learned from the various eye tracking studies that have been done over the years. A reader recently forwarded a decent article that collected a bunch of these into one place. Twenty-three to be exact. Here are a few of them relating to webpage layout and design:
From the massive quantity of information on the Internet arises the challenge of trying to organize it in a way that enables users to find what they need. What good is having all the answers to all the questions if you can’t locate the answer to the question you are actually asking? Media sharing, social bookmarking, and citation sites (i.e. Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, etc.) that are growing in popularity are using a new way to organize and categorize the information on their sites with “tag clouds.” These tag clouds are collections of keywords (also called tags) found within the user interface that categorize the content based on popularity or usage. Research conducted at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany used an eye tracking device to compare three different tag cloud layouts in an attempt to identify the most effective one.
Many people are familiar with the popular “Where’s Waldo” books, in which you search for the red and white sweater-clad Waldo in a chaotic scene of colors and images. But while you were scanning the pictures for the little man, you were most likely unaware of the complex brain functions and visual processing that was occurring. An article entitled “How Our Brains Find Waldo,” answers the question “How do we find one distinct element in a visually busy environment?”
Several Eye Tracking Update posts have mentioned saccades and fixations, two terms that essentially make up the nuts and bolts of eye tracking. It was Louis Émile Javal, a French ophthalmologist that first noticed humans’ tendency to dart their eyes around when reading, stopping and starting as they scan across a sentence on a page. Fixations and saccades show up in a recent study in which researchers attempted to understand how effective emotionally oriented advertisements are to viewers.
