Eye tracking and Heatmaps

Usability testing is becoming big business these days. It’s no longer good enough to stick some post it notes on the fridge, map out site architecture and hope for the best. People are realising that the only way to effectively judge the performance of a site is to analyse people while they’re actually using it.

This analysis can take a number of forms, but an incredibly insightful tool can be Eye tracking and the subsequent creation of Heatmaps: an image of a website where areas of particular interest are displayed as “hotter” than areas that nobody paid any attention too.

We saw this in action at the WWW2006 conference last week, when we had a chance to sit down and try it out for ourselves.

Seth Goding has a very interesting video on his site, showing footage from an eye tracking study for Squidoo The results are fascinating because it clearly shows the almost random and haphazard way in which some users navigate a site. You can clearly define and page structure and hierarchy, but it doesn’t mean a user will follow it. Instead they seem to jump from block to block on the page, until something of interest catches the eye and maintains attention.

The second site of interest shows a selection of Heatmaps from Etre. Focusing on 5 major UK highstreet retailer websites, the results show eye tracking studies of 40 participants simply using a website. The results were then collated to create Heatmaps showing areas of focus for users.

It’s hard to draw any sweeping general conclusions here, but the results make for fascinating reading, and it shows that you never really know how people are using your website until you watch them at it.