Tag Archives: eyetracking

Eyetracking or Eye Tracking
is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (“where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head.

Is Market Research Precisely Wrong?

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There is a fundamental problem with most market research. David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’, recognised it:

 

“People don’t do what they say, don’t say what they think, and don’t think how they feel.”

Traditional methods of market research focus on what can be gleaned from the conscious mind largely because until recently the tools to investigate the subconscious mind were not readily available.

THiNK Eyetracking has recently completed a comparison study of an award wining national advertising campaign that clearly shows the difference in conscious and unconscious responses to advertising. Continue reading →

Brand Building Takes Time AND Talent

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The lead story in this week’s Campaign about Pfizer looking for a retained European agency a for a well known pharmaceutical product reminded us of the award winning advert for Vitta Farma:

The Original Vitta Farma Ad

The Original Vitta Farma Ad

So we tested the advert in our omnibus in the context of Men’s Health magazine with a sample of thirty men and found that the advert elicited subconscious emotional responses of surprise with confusion, mild shock and in some cases disgust. These emotions were not resolved in the majority of readers because they did not know what the brand Vitta Farma does and they didn’t read the white out of pink text ‘Medicine for erectile dysfunction with special discount.’ As can be seen by the eye tracking heat map. Continue reading →

The (Long Forgotten?) Art of Long Copy

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Some months ago I was discussing the demise of long copy advertisements on a train journey with Rory Sutherland: I asked him if thought the amount of time we spend online had shortened our attention spans and if this had led to the demise of long copy ads?

“Oh no my dear boy!”  Boomed the reply. “The decline began long before that, you see the problem stems from when the industry started to place more emphasis on art and less on the copy, this happened at least ten years before the internet came into its own.”

I was encouraged by Rory’s response and wanted to test if people would still engage with long copy adverts. As good fortune would have it I found a I copy of Good Housekeeping from the late 90’s whilst on holiday in France. Whilst flicking through it I found an interesting long copy ad from BT. I ‘borrowed’ the magazine and included the BT advert as part of a ThinkPrint Advertising Effectiveness omnibus study. Continue reading →

Make sure you do good audience research: observe don’t ask

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One of the things we’ve learned about research at Think Eye Tracking is that people don’t always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This article explains why that can happen and how eye tracking can be used to peer into peoples subconscious thought processes.

eyetrackingmenwomen11

 

Think Eye Tracking recently showed the above picture to thirty men and thirty women for five seconds while they were being eye tracked. They did not know what they were going to see, we surprised them! Continue reading →

Eye tracking and User Experience for Game Play

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Two of the things that I love about eye tracking are:

  • Actionable results
  • Intuitive and easy to understand reporting

The eye tracking on this piece of research was done using a head mounted eye tracker by Locarna. This type of eyetracker is particularly useful for shopper research or as we will see, other real World situations such as user testing games that have novel or complex interfaces and peripherals.

Poppy wears head mounted eye tracker

One of the most successful areas for growth in the last decade has been the games industry; it grossed $11.7 billion in the US alone in 2008 which, surprisingly for some, is more than the film industry. Continue reading →

Eye (Tracking) For The Ladies – The Subconcious Secrets of a Speed Dater

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We recently produced an article for The Sun on speed-dating; using Headmounted Eyetracking to attain insight into the subconscious thoughts of the speed dater.

We often use Headmounted eyetrackers to help brands and supermarkets understand how consumers shop, and I was pleased to use the technology to help the speed dater, Josh, on what may be the most important “purchase” decision he makes! Continue reading →

The Great Eye Tracking Debate

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Do You Absolutely Positively Need Eye Tracking For Web Usability Studies?

In May 2009 Kara Pernice and I debated this question at the UK’s Usability Professionals Association. Kara argued that you do not absolutely positively need eye tracking for web usability studies and I argued that you do.

Truth is, you don’t absolutely positively need eyetracking for web usability studies, but it would not have been much of a debate if we had both taken the middle ground!

I find it frustrating that there is still much misunderstanding about eye tracking in the usability profession. Eyetracking is not a paradigm shift, it does not fundamentally change the way you run a user test. It allows a moderator to move away from relying on the concurrent talk aloud protocol to an informed retrospective protocol. We call this protocol Post Experience Eyetracked Protocol or PEEP and we have developed, refined and tested it internally and with academic partners over many years. Continue reading →

Behavioural Economics and Eye Tracking

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I’ve recently read Dan Airley’s excellent book ‘Predictable Irrationality’ and it got me to thinking about eye tracking.

Much of the book is about the importance relativity plays in making decisions; we don’t make decisions in isolation and we don’t make them based on a perfect model of the World. We often make decisions based on the information that we have available at the time we make them.

One of the examples Dan goes into is from a subscription advert for The Economist. The advert gives three options:

  • Economist.com subscription US$59.00
  • Print subscription US $125.00
  • Print & web subscription US $125.00

When given this opportunity 84% of readers chose print and web and 16% choose web only.

He then ran the experiment again with only two options:

  • Economist.com US $59.00
  • Print & web $125.00

The results reversed; 68% chose web only and 32% chose print and web

Dan goes on to talk about the importance of the middle option, even though no one chose it, it helped people figure out what they wanted.

This led me to thinking about how we maybe sub-optimising gondola ends; when we only show promotional items we may be denying the opportunity for the consumer to see the added value the promotion offers when compared to full price items.

I wanted to explore if this was true so I ran an eye tracking experiment with 60 consumers whom I asked to choose an Innocent Smoothie. 30 of the consumers were shown a gondola aisle shelf with only promotional items from the planogram in Figure 1.1.

Fig 1.1 Offer only smoothies

Fig 1.1 Gondola Isle planogram showing only Innocent Smoothies that were on offer.

And 30 consumers saw a section of the chilled isle that contained smoothies on offer next to a non offer smoothie shown in fig 1.2.

Fig 1.2 Offer and non offer smoothies

Fig 1.2 Chilled isle planogram showing Innocent Smoothies on offer and at full price.

The heat map shown below demonstrates the consumers engaged with the promotional offers.

Fig 1.3 Eye Tracked offer only smoothies

Fig 1.3 Eye tracked gondola Isle planogram showing only Innocent Smoothies that were on offer.

Fig 1.4 Eye Tracked offer and non offer smoothies

Fig 1.4 Eye tracked chilled isle planogram showing Innocent Smoothies on offer and at full price. The yellow circle highlights the attention on the full priced smoothie price.

The heatmap shows the consumers engaged with the promotional offer AND with the full price item, not on promotion.

After selecting the smoothie of their choice I asked the consumers if their purchase was good value for money on a 7 point likert scale, 1 being very good value for money and 7 being not very good value for money.

Consumers who saw the promotional item only items gave a mean score of 2.4. Consumers who saw the promotional items next to a full priced premium offer gave 1.7 even though they purchased the same item!

This is similar to another example that Dan mentions in his book; well run restaurants in New York often have a very expensive dish on the menu, its placement is not for it to be sold, but to make the other items on the menu appear to be better value for money.

One of the things that interests me about behavioural economics and eyetracking is that both focus on the decisions people make and offer insight in to how subconscious processes influence their decisions, I hope you do too.

You can see a 20 minute talk on this subject by Dan Airley speaking at the TED network it’s 20 minutes well spent!

As part of Think Eye Tracking’s carbon positive policy each approved comment on this and any other blog article on the site we will pay for a tree to be planted in Carbon Clear’s Sustainable Community Tree Planting India.

Thanks for reading! http://twitter.com/modestrobert

Eye tracking to Support the Creative Process

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We saved Ogilvy and British gas 8 to 12 months of multivariate testing by starting with the right creative route, here’s how:

The route to creative excellence has to date been based more on intuition and gut feel that rigorous scientific pre-testing; we hope our recent agreement with Ogilvy will change the process for ever.

How the Creative Process Was

The creative agency comes up with several routes for a campaign. At a large meeting the Creative Director presents the routes and explains the motivation and goals for each one. He then sits down and looks thoughtful whilst waiting until the most senior person on the client side speaks up and says which one they prefer. There is some discussion and the route is thus chosen.

How the Creative Process Will Be

The agency comes up with several routes for a campaign. At a large meeting the Creative Director presents the routes and explains the motivation and goals for each one. She also presents how each route was actually engaged with by consumers who were eye tracked on each one. The eye tracking shows if two key goals were met:

1. Did the creative get attention?

2. Did the creative deliver the intended message(s)?

The client and agency then have an informed discussion about how each is performing and may select one of the routes or to choose elements from individual ones that are performing well to iterate into a new optimised design.

Simple, scientific, common sense, and you don’t have to take our word for it, see what Skip Fidura, email marketing guru at DotAgency, said,

“We first used eye tracking to indicate which of three design concepts were the best. Interestingly, the one that came out on top had not been the client’s or the agency’s favourite.

We then used these initial results to optimise the design and tested it again; further optimising the template from this second round of analysis before putting it in the field with a robust testing strategy to improve it further.

We estimate that even if we had picked the right design in the first place, it would have taken eight to twelve months of testing to get to the version that we put in the field on day one.” Continue reading →