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Eye Tracking Tests Real Time Feature From Google

Eye Tracking Tests Real Time Feature From Google People like news. We’ve come to expect a regular flow of news to inform us daily about what is happening around us, near of far. We like to know what’s going on in the world, and consuming new information has become routine, be it via the internet, television, or the “old fashioned” way, newspapers. And with our change in habits, we’ve also come to expect new ways of having information delivered; Facebook and Twitter are now household names, and that’s just the beginning. But as we know, some new ideas stick while others fall by the wayside.

One application getting both recent coverage and flak is Google’s real time search results. A number of posts being brought to our attention have to do with the real time search feed and users’ indifference to it. Google has started to incorporate Twitter statuses into their real time search feeds, and some eye tracking reports are showing that people just don’t seem to care.

One study recently completed by online marketers OneUp Web, used eye tracking to look at the way a sample of 44 people interacted with Google’s search pages. Participants were divided into two groups, a “consumer” group who were instructed to search for something they wanted to buy, and a “forager” group, who were asked simply to search Google for information about a particular project.

In general, the “consumers” averaged about nine seconds before settling on the real time results presented in Google’s feed for the first time. The “foragers” took longer – 14 seconds, with the results indicating the different attention spans needed to quickly scan for relavant information about a product or to browse around looking for more “ephemeral” data. Once the initial feed was discovered, the “consumers” tended to click on it about 10% less than the foraging group, demonstrating two different thought processes in action. If you are shopping, real time data isn’t something your particularly interested in. But if you’re looking for news and more ephemeral information, perhaps Google is onto something.

The study found that only 55% of the participants, however, could easily find the real time feed in the first place. Google often places their real time results pretty far down the resulting list. Eye tracking heat maps show that the participants spent most of the time searching the top portion of the feed and it makes sense that the foraging groups’ eyes eventually wandered down the page as they perused the data more thoroughly than the consumers.

Of the participants, 74% hadn’t heard of real time data before the study, and when they discovered it, it apparently left them pretty indifferent. Still, it’s hard to say what will fail and what will take root, and perhaps throwing things at the wall to see what sticks is one way progress works when it comes to the internet.

Study: Users Don’t Really Care or Know About Google’s Real Time Feed

Eye Tracking Tests Real Time Feature From Google

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