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Eye Tracking Exploring the Differences Between Baidu and Google

Posted on Jan 21, 2010 | 0 comments

Eye Tracking Exploring the Differences Between Baidu and Google So many differences exist between cultures, it’s natural to wonder how various cultures see. A blog called Just Behave recently asked a question along these lines about the Chinese market, setting off to perform their own eye tracking experiment to see how eye movement differs from Western culture to tendencies in China.

Apparently, the author was getting a lot of queries asking if he had completed eye tracking studies of other cultures, and the most often asked was about China – as we know, an enormous market. ‘As Westerners,’ writes Just Behave’s Gord Hotchkiss, ‘we have a curiosity about the world’s largest market but very little insight into the actual nature of their online interactions.’

Taking advantage of their local university, the researchers found Chinese student volunteers from the English as a Second Language program that had only been in North America for a few weeks. Using a Tobii eye tracking station with a Chinese keyboard and character set, the researchers worked with the students and a translator from Microsoft to help with the study’s design and interpretation of the results.

Fifty Chinese students ranging from 18-25 were brought in to the lab, where they were given a number of tasks. The participants performed free searches and looked for online information about a digital camera, mimicking some of the eye tracking tests they had worked on with Western students. Additionally, the students were asked to look up information about the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as well as entering certain demographic information and information about their everyday internet usage. Keeping the tests consistent enabled them to see if the scan patterns were indeed different between China and North America.

And were they different? Quite. Using a eye tracking heat map, the researchers were able to see the habits and tendencies of the various students. On a Google search results page, Chinese students tended towards the typical upper left orientation hot spot, but don’t continue on to a typically North American vertical scan from that spot. Horizontal scanning appeared to be far more spread out. In North America, scan patterns typically create sort of an F shape, and variations to the norm are usually minimal. For the Chinese students, however, the researchers found that there is very little in the way of standardized behavior. The Chinese students tended to scan the Google results in groups of 4 or 5 at a time – a “consideration set.” Actually, this is quite normal and compares to what they were seeing in North America, but North American eyes generally move down the left side from there. For the Chinese students, there didn’t appear to be any consistent patterns.

The article goes on to point out a few other interesting variations, and I suggest having a look. The Chinese students tended to look at the initial page for around 30 seconds, while the North Americans typically scan for 8 to 10 seconds to determine a degree of relevance for the information. They think this has to do with the use of symbols as opposed to individual letters, where concepts “take their final meaning from a group of combined symbols.” So, it’s much more difficult to scan this information quickly.

As the blog says, they were more interested in the fact that they should do the study, rather than the fact that they simply could do the study. The Chinese market is an enormously important global marketplace, and not a day passes that we in the West go without hearing business news relevant to China.

I found this study to be one of the more interesting ones I’ve heard about recently. Follow the link below to read more about it and see some of the other findings.

Chinese Eye Tracking Study: Baidu Vs Google

Eye Tracking Exploring the Differences Between Baidu and Google

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