A day of eye tracking at the Expo

Eye tracking is amazing, insightful, state of the art technology that enables you to literally see through people’s eyes. It’s most often used to increase sales on e-commerce websites, software or products but can also be used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns before they launch.

If you’ve never used eye tracking to gain insights into consumer behaviour then you really are missing a whole section of vital information to improve your user experience and conversion.

We recently exhibited at Salford Business Expo where we held live, interactive eye tracking demos using our website eye tracking unit. The unit looks like a standard computer monitor however inside are hidden cameras that track the users’ eye movements, mapping them onto what’s being tested so we can see in real time precisely where they’re looking.

One of our live eye tracking demos

We have several types of eye tracking units from a portable pair of glasses to large Monitors, that we use to test a whole range of things:

Digital – Websites, software, touch interfaces, mobile apps, tablet apps

Products and hardware ergonomics – Mobile phones, machinery, remote controls

Marketing – Adverts in magazines, digital adverts online, billboards

Packaging / out of the box experience – Does your packaging attract the customer? Measure and compare your out-of-the box experience.

Shopping customer experience – How do customers shop in your store? What draws their attention? Does your product / brand stand out against competitor products?

On a very basic level we’re observing and analysing human behaviour with digital and product platforms, our aim being to improve the interaction by making it feel intuitive, easy and enjoyable. If you can achieve this people are 87% more likely to buy from you, they’ll buy more, come back more frequently and will be 3 times more likely to recommend you.

We were impressed by their focus on what actually works, rather than just what looks nice on a mock up

Visitors to our stand at the expo were clearly fascinated and amazed when we replayed their eye tracking videos back to them, discussing with them why certain elements of the website being tested caught their attention and why other things that should have in theory caught their attention didn’t. User behaviour is unpredictable and differs between types of people, so for design to work to sell your product or service and not just look pretty, it needs to be user centred.

Just like a shop front, if people aren’t drawn in through the door by seeing something that appeals to them or if they can’t work out how to get through the door, they’ll walk on by and stop at your competitor instead.

We run and analyse all our eye tracking research so we do all the hard work for you, delivering the insights you need to sell more of your products or services.

We had a brilliant day at the expo, educating the people of Salford and Manchester to the benefits of user experience and eye tracking and we hope at the very least that they start to think more about the people using their website or product. As opposed to designing something that just looks nice, our designs actually work to bring you more sales (as well as looking nice too of course!).

An example of our mobile and tablet eye tracking unit setup