Eye Tracking – Duh! 
February 3rd, 2006
This Eye Track stuff is great! I found about it through this neat book, Mind Hacks, I got from the Web2.0 Conference last fall. Basically they track where peoples attention is placed on a web page, which goes beyond standard web analytics which only help you determine where people click. I think they have a very interesting service that is quite affordable and mandatory for anyone who places any importance on their website. We’ll definitely be using their services later this year when we re-design our site later this year year. Some really interesting that would be hard to know intuitively, one of the most interesting observations is about how a website can have dead space that doesn’t really get read at all.
| 
Del.icio.us
This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Business, Usability – HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Entries (RSS)
and
February 21st, 2006 at 3:29 am
regarding dead space. We had a client that was very concerned about the column on the right hand side of the page – their site was designed with a fixed width, suitable for 800×600 resolution, so at 1024 and higher, they had the empty column (kind of like this blog, if it hadn’t been centred…). Anyways, they wanted us to explore the options, such as using a liquid layout.. but that turned out not feasible within their budget.
So, awhile later, we were conducting usability studies on their site. After we completed our tasks/scenarios with the users, we decided to tack on a “tell us which of these looks best” type question, where we filled the dead space with different background designs, just to fill it up. So, in the original, the background was white. In the tests, we created a couple yellow ones and a couple blue ones (to fit with the site design). And guess what, none of the testers even noticed a difference – even after I told them there was a difference, and even after I opened five separate windows and tabbed between them. So, based on my experience, it is true that users totally tune out some areas of the screen – it’s as if they don’t even see them…..