GazeHawk Makes Eye Tracking More Affordable
More eye tracking and heat map news from the World Wide Web. Typically, you’ve got just a pair of choices when it comes to site heat mapping. You can buy the necessary equipment, often cost prohibitive, or you can pay a consultant or expert to use their equipment. But every now and again we come across a new do-it-yourself device in the eye tracking and usability world, and the Y Combinator funded GazeHawk project might have a novel approach– webcams.
GazeHawk is a less expensive alternative to most existing eye tracking services and at reportedly a tenth of the price. Co-founded by Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, the newly launched GazeHawk only requires basic consumer hardware and proprietary software, much cheaper than the custom equipment and bodies needed for most usability testing.
GazeHawk’s innovative idea is a sort of crowd-sourcing one – it uses its own network of test subjects, and all you need to do as a website owner is give them a URL or screenshot. They look at the page and use the software and camera combination to create a heat map showing the most actively viewed places on the site.
TechCrunch is calling GazeHawk “disruptive” in the sense that they have yet to see a low-cost, low-effort eye tracking service before, and according to Krausz, GazeHawk’s future plans “include a number of extra features, better visualizations, allowing people to use their own test viewers, and eventually expansion in to the UX industry – creating products based on tester feedback, i.e. what people want to see.”
Experienced and weary browsers have the ability to ignore ads, having learned where the important information is on a page and avoiding the marketing elements altogether. People have become quite good at ignoring ads these days and, as Krausz explains, “If anything looks like one you lose the entire area.”
The website TechCrunch ran the eye tracking software over their own page and found that, most notably, people check out their story rotator and ING ads but not their events stuff. Accurate heat mapping can provide supplemental insight into what your viewers are doing and where they’re looking. If you’re making decisions about online ad placement, cost per click, or cost per impression, heat mapping could be your friend.
To read more detail on GazeHawk at TechCrunch’s page, have a look here:
Y Combinator Backed GazeHawk Heatmaps With Web Cams
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