Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could see our website through our visitors’ eyes? Well, we can! There are many companies now offering what is called ‘eye tracking studies’ where a tool called the ‘Eye Heat Map’ is used. The study involves different users looking at the same pages of various websites and their eye movements across the pages are monitored and tracked.
The result you will see is a screen shot of your chosen web page, with varying colours overlaid on the shot. The colours go in order of how much time people spend looking at a certain part of the page as well as tracking where the eye goes to first, with red being the first place and longest viewed, moving through to orange, yellow, green and so on. See the picture below.
Like most of these tools, there are good and bad points. However, by using it as an element in your site conversion strategy, it can better enable you to anticipate what your clients will do and subsequently design your page or site to satisfy their needs.
The obvious advantage to using the ‘Eye Heat Map’ is that we can see what our users are looking at first and where they subsequently move around the page or site. It helps us to understand why people click (or don’t click) on certain parts.
Once a pattern is established, you can then decide where to put your best selling products/services so that they are seen as much as possible and so receive a high conversion rate. This relates to the concept of ‘shelf space’ where the traditional navigation of a site will be to ensure that the prime shelf space of a site is used to sell the most important products or services a company offers.
Unfortunately, all too often we see this concept ignored, with many companies putting general information such as ‘about us’, ‘terms and conditions’ in prime selling areas instead of ‘special offers’, ‘exclusive products’ etc.
It is due to these eye tracking studies and other research that it is commonly thought that the eye first sees the top left hand corner of a page, it then looks across the top of the page and then down the left hand side. This is the traditional navigation you find on nearly every decent site that is selling a product or service.
Whilst eye tracking studies can be a helpful element of site conversion strategies, there are also some obvious flaws. For instance, the navigational structure we describe above is so common that a large majority of users will instinctively look at the top left hand corner of a page first and then across the top and so on. Therefore when looking at results of the eye tracking, one must take this factor into consideration.
In addition, when users are taking part in these kinds of studies, they are acting as a consumer not actually actively going through the buying process. We think the study would be much more beneficial on users who are actually going through the process and are really in ‘shopping mode’. All too often when people take part in the study, results can be tainted as they are aware that there are certain things that the company is looking for.
If all of these factors are taken into consideration then an eye tracking study can be a useful element of your site conversion strategy. If you don’t want to go through the expense or time of actually commissioning one of these studies, then there is a great free tool on the web. It is available at www.feng-gui.com. You enter your domain name and it will show you how users view your site using the Heat Map theory. This is only to be taken as a guideline as this tool uses a neural algorithm, which mimics human visual attention as opposed to recording what people are actually seeing on your site.
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