Eye-tracking software: Getting inside your mind

>> Music My name is Amy Buckner. I am co-founder of AnswerLab, and I help companies build better online user experiences.

Music Companies often will build a new site or a product that really isn't informed with what their users want or their users need, and it may fail. Lots of folks in a company can think that they understand what the users want because they're a user, but you can't anticipate all user perspectives. So what Answer Lab does is figure out what to build and build it right the first time. A great example would be a company that we work with who provides products that they sell through Amazon and Best Buy and their own website. Background music And so we're working with them to research how people actually shop for their products on those websites. We watch what they're doing, we watch what they're looking at, and we see what are they really focusing their attention on to understand about the product. One of the ways we do this is through eye tracking, and for us to really truly understand the user experience, we have to understand what users think, what they do, and what they see, and the eye tracking lets us really get into the mind of the user and understand where they're focused on the page. This helps fill in the gap for what they might say that they're reacting to versus what they actually notice. Now the output from this that our researchers focus on are two things. One is called a "heat map," which shows us in great detail the concentration of their gaze. And the other is a "gaze plot," that shows us the sequence in which users look at various elements on a page. Another example is a technique we use called "card sorting," and this is typically involved when a client might have a vast amount of information on their website that they need to figure out, how do we categorize? How would people think about this information being grouped so that we can build the navigation for the site? And the card sorting exercise essentially lets us have users group pieces of information into ways that make sense to them. Background music In the next five years, I guess I would really expect to see that we have a lot more people coming into this field, graduating in courses in HCI, Human Computer Interaction. We also think there'll be many more companies that really embrace user experience as a philosophy and as a defined part of their development process and have metrics to ensure that that user experience is measured within the organization.

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