Advanced Eye Tracking Research

In the last article, we introduced eye tracking – a system of measuring eye movements and location that helps companies figure out where customers are looking when they look at a website, a product, and more. Today, we'll take a look at some of the additional ways that companies may use eye tracking hardware and software. These include: Eye Catchers When you create a product, you want the consumer's eye to be grabbed by the detail that is most likely to catch the viewer's attention.

That is another benefit of eye tracking. With eye tracking, the very first thing the customer views is logged, and you can see (via charts, heat maps, etc.), where the eye went first and how long it spent there. You can also compare that to other data points as well as log how long a viewer spent on looking at any one feature.

All of this can tell you what really stands out for the customer. Product Launching Finally, when a product is launched in the store, the customer needs to be able to notice. So companies can use eye tracking to see if the packaging, order, etc., are working to draw attention to the new product.

They can also see if there's something they can change in order to increase or decrease that attention, and how much time they spend looking at a product relative to other products. This is an important part of releasing a new product.

Eye tracking is, of course, visual. For eye tracking to be useful, you have to be evaluating something that requires attention or consumption of information.

For example, if you were a teacher that wanted to see how well a student pays attention to what they read, you could map their eye movements. A student that isn't spending roughly equal amount of time on each line of a book is one that probably isn't reading that thoroughly. Companies use eye tracking for a variety of purposes related to this type of information consumption.

It may be that they're looking to see if the important parts of an ad get noticed while others get ignored, or if their product is doing something to draw attention away from its main features, or if something about the product or information bores them, or if a competitor's products are always viewed first because of packaging. All of these are where eye tracking can come in handy, and that is why it is quickly being adopted as an additional market research technique.