Visual saliency programs exist that are intended to be a cheap alternative, or preliminary step to eyetracking. The basic premise is that our visual attention is drawn to areas of high visual salience, so without testing actual people, we can figure out what people are going to look at in a visual display.

A free version of this software is Fen Gui. On their website they have a very clear explanation of the different visual elements such as contrast, colour, intensity etc. that contribute to visual saliency. Also presented is a comparison with actual eye tracking data. The similarity shown is fairly compelling, but we decided to conduct our own tests… after all if this gives the same results as eye tracking, why would anyone pay the time and expense for eye tracking?

We compared saliency heatmaps with eyetracking heatmaps across a broad range of mediums, webpages, emails, print advertising, packaging, and outdoor scenes. Not surprisingly, the mediums with text were extremely different as the saliency heatmaps do not take into account people’s motivations, but focuses just on potential visual engagement. This isn’t particularly interesting, what is more interesting is how the saliency heatmaps compare to the eyetracking heatmaps for more purely visual mediums such as packaging and outdoor scenes.