Blog Analysis and Optimization with Eyetracking -- or "Oh, oh, that blog's writing needs fixing"

Eyetools testing showed that the original "Navigation Bar" blog wasn't written as well as I'd thought... here's what I found, and what I did about it.

This is what happens when you have easy access to eyetracking testing: you start wondering how well you're doing writing about it... and after wondering very briefly, you test it and find that it needs improvement. Alas.

An Eyetools Heatmap of people reading one of our blogs

Our first blog: All that red at the top shows that everyone reads our title and the first 1-line paragraph, but that they start dropping off in the middle of the "story" paragraph (guess the writing wasn't as good as I thought :-).

The "statistics" section held good information, but only 60% of people read it. Can I do better?

And the "punch line" certainly is getting wasted down there (50% and mostly skimming). No big surprise. Shouldn't have been so egotistical to believe that I could actually hold people's attention ALL the way to the end, but that final point was important, so I'm moving it.

So, I'm going to tweak the text of the original blog and post it as a new one. I've still got a bunch of people who will be coming through for this study so I'll test that as well! Crossing fingers... I'm going to go write the new version now...

Comments

[Liz Lawley]

Is it possible that people scrolled the article up, and so the punchline was actually being read in the "red zone," rather than ignored?

[Greg]

Liz, the heatmap takes into account scrolling, so, much to my initial chagrin, they really weren't reading it. I need to hurry up and made some changes and re-post the "improved" version as a new blog (with eye testing to see if it's "better").

[Chris Zagers]

Another thing you may want to check out is the demographic differences between customers. In China they read right to left in vertical columns traditionally.

[ernest]

Thank you very much for your great post. Absolutely, your post is very usefull to me. Thank you.

[tsishkou]

Another alternative to human-based eyetracking is based on computer vision research results. Currently we can take into account both low level (color, edge, texture, ...) and high level (text, object recognition, ...) result and train a system based on 100.000 examples generated by real people. Finally, we can reach >80% of similarity having less then 1 minute processing time (most of it spent to download a webpage) and ability to run as many test as we want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZOVcmwHZZk

[tsishkou]

Another alternative to human-based eyetracking is based on computer vision research results. Currently we can take into account both low level (color, edge, texture, ...) and high level (text, object recognition, ...) result and train a system based on 100.000 examples generated by real people. Finally, we can reach >80% of similarity having less then 1 minute processing time (most of it spent to download a webpage) and ability to run as many test as we want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZOVcmwHZZk

[watch]

Thanks for sharing. this is great stuff. by....

[movies]

thanks. very nice.

[free full movies]

Do Google Analytics offer heat map?

[watch movies]

Thanks for sharing.