Eyetools Research

Interest in a eyetracking "Community of Learning" focused on weblogs?

Darren Rowse got me thinking about how AdSense revenue supports a lot of blogs, and how optimizing a blog's use of AdSense can have a big impact on revenue.

As a result, Eyetools collected eyetracking data on a number of blogs that use AdSense to illustrate how AdSense position, design, integration, etc. affects viewing (and thereby clicks). The intent was to put this together in a little report focusing on how to optimize AdSense revenue for blogs.

An example of
a sub-optimal use of AdSense
on a blog

(How to interpret an Eyetools heatmap)

An interesting thing happened though. In talking to Darren about the AdSense findings, he started mentioning other things that he wished he knew so that he could produce a better blog -- like how writing and design decisions affect reading of his blog (and blogs in general). BUT, despite my overall pride related to how we've been able to get our pricing down from $15k a study to $1000 to $2500 for many companies, our pricing was way out of most blogger's league. As Darren said, he has "probably $50 - $100."

And this got me thinking about a "Weblog Community of Learning" that would focus on eyetracking data related to weblogs.

The Community of Learning would be an interactive discussion forum and would focus on one or two main topics each month, which would have real eyetracking data to back up the points being explored. Darren asked about "the use of bold/italics/underline or other formatting etc. in the middle of posts and articles and how that would affect reading," but there are a number of issues that could be focused on.

Probably the first month would focus on optimizing AdSense on blogs (backed up by eyetracking data showing how various placements, treatments, etc affect viewing and clicking), but then the forum would delve into other areas. It wouldn't be free -- it would probably cost somewhere between $30 - $50 per month, but at least that's a lot closer to being affordable to a typical blogger, and it would provide access to data that costs a whole lot more than that.

I'm curious if people would find this valuable. If not, then it's not worth putting the effort in to getting it set up. But I hope it is of interest to people now -- it would be a lot of fun focusing on this.

Let me know what you think!

You can email me at "greg.blog at eyetools.com" or comment here.

Wasting money on content in Visual Dead Zones

E*Trade's homepage from January 2001

Visual dead zones reduced E*Trade's ability to communicate with their target customers, because low percentages of people read their promotional content.

This is an old story*, but one of my favorites because it illustrates an important point, yet was really fun:

We eyetracked E*Trade's homepage and then inserted gibberish into it to illustrate that content in a "visual dead zone" doesn't get read and might as well not exist.

To identify parts of E*Trade's homepage that weren't being viewed, we collected eyetrack data on just 4 people (not too many people, eh?) as they surfed E*Trade's website to decide for themselves whether they wanted to sign up for E*Trade's services. We found that about 1/5 of the screen real estate above the fold was being wasted, so once we located un-viewed areas, we came up with gibberish to replace the existing text on a cached version of their homepage (this was a lot of fun!).

Examples of the gibberish tested on E*Trade's homepage:

• FDIC distrusts us * No Bank Quality * Will Lose Value
• Not ready to event an insurance? Tax group of our manager discussion free of funds.
• Get $25 to close an E*Trade Bank Money Market Plus Advice! Tax a gear cool and ATM access!
• ...and more

Then, we re-tested the modified homepage in the lab. As a secondary test, we also sent it out to a bunch of people who we didn't eyetrack. After people had seen the page while evaluating whether they were interested in signing up for E*Trade's services, we asked them if there was anything strange about the homepage. Only 1 in 25 people noticed!

The moral of the story is, if you wish to optimize your content: If content on your webpage is in a visual dead zone, it might as well not exist. People can't click on what they don't see. Money and time spent on content in a visual dead zone is wasted.

* This is an old E*Trade website -- we ran this test in January 2001. Since then, E*Trade has become a client, and is very proactive in working to improve the experience for their customers.

The eye data shows that my writing style stinks ("it's ready to be optimized" to put it nicely!)

Eyetools Heatmap of people reading this blog
blog.eyetools.net

The "red" indicates my titles are read, but the "green" and "blue" shows that not so much of my content is read.

(How to interpret an Eyetools heatmap)

I'm a smart technical guy -- analysis and visualizations come easy to me -- and I'm even successful at public speaking, but trying to figure out HOW to write this weblog eats at me!

But I can tell you one thing... All of the blog entries earlier than this one sure aren't written the right way! I can't speak to the success of this entry you're reading right now -- you can leave a comment -- but I guarrantee you I'm going to find out in next week's eyetracking test!

So, my writing stinks, and here's why I know...

The lack of the color red on that eyetracking heatmap over there shows that people aren't hanging on my every word, despite the fact that they should be since this eyetracking stuff is fascinating and valuable (in my unbiased opinion).

But is it my writing style or lack of value that explains the non-reading?

Well, given that I believe that knowing whether people read what you write is valuable, I'm stuck with the realization that my writing must not be all that great...

Alas.

But I'm learning. I'm going to be a great writer yet! I'm going to iterate, try different things and test the effect until I get it right. Now, in retrospect, I wish I had gotten this feedback a long time ago in college -- maybe I could have gotten a better grade on all those essays.

Guiding a website redesign with eyetracking -- an Eyetools case-study

A PDF of a homepage redesign using Eyetools eyetracking can be found here (4 pages, 905 K, images of a site before/after, plus Eyetools heatmaps).

Several people have asked how eyetracking can be used for homepage optimization, and they wanted more details regarding using eyetracking to guide the redesign of a website (with large-size images of the before and after websites + eye data). So, here it is!

Note: this is a full detailed version of a short blog entry I made earlier.

Eyetracking Google Search Results -- Eyetools research (this one should help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO/SEM) planning).

Eyetools Heatmap of people searching on
Google Search Results

(How to interpret an Eyetools heatmap)

New Eyetools EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and Pay-per-click search results for visibility and click through in Google.

(PRWEB) -- A joint eye tracking study conducted by eye tracking firm Eyetools and search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it.com has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a "golden triangle."

These eyetracking results apply to Search Engine Optimization and Marketing.

Read more...

CSS Zen Garden -- an Eyetools eyetracking analysis

Design decisions affect what people read. The CSS Zen Garden always has the same content but different visual treatments -- and you can see how this affects reading.

New: Vote for the next design to be eyetracked by Eyetools

Same content, different visual treatments
Original homepage (live site)	Version 145 (live site)

CSS Zen Garden is a beautiful place -- it demonstrates the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the flexibility of design because the content is always the same but the visual treatments are very creative and very different! Here are two examples (stay tuned for more in the future).

Notice that version 145 has great use of sub-heads and increased reading of the paragraphs below them relative to the original homepage.

The navigation bar on Version 145 is viewed and clicked more.

Also the wider column gets less reading across the width of the page on the original homepag. You can see people start to read and then stop.

Is the Washington Post wasting money on the bottom half of their homepage?

My recent analysis of Washington Post's homepage points out that the weak design of the bottom half of their page reduces reading. I received a comment urging me to tie the findings to actual revenue impact, so here goes!

Content costs money for the Washington Post to provide — they have to pay their reporters to generate it, their IT people to put it on the site, and their ISP for bandwidth usage.

If people decide not to read a piece of news because they're not interested, then that's fine. But if potentially-interested people don't see entire sections of content because of a design flaw, then they lose money, and their brand is negatively impacted — it will appear to people that the site offers less content than it actually does, and they will spend less time on the site.

Do they realize they are suffering financially? Probably not... they probably think it's "normal" to have low click-throughs from content below the fold. Just looking at their click logs, they wouldn't be able to realize that potentially-interested people never received the opportunity to click.

The new Washington Post Homepage design -- an Eyetools eyetracking analysis

Eyetools Heatmap of people reading
the new Washington Post homepage
(launched February 15, 2005)

Last week, the Washington Post announced a new homepage — here's an Eyetools Heatmap of a group of 19 new visitors viewing the new page and what we can learn from its design.

Fast summary:

• Top half of page — good readable design.
• Bottom half of page — bad example of line-spacing and white-space discourages reading.

Note: This entry is not an exhaustive report, instead it's a quick sample of things! Despite that, this entry is still too long by most weblog standards — there's always so much to be said about the data... alas.

How eyetracking helps website redesigns: an Eyetools case-study

Guiding a website redesign with Eyetools eyetracking data offers these advantages:

• Objective, visual feedback to your designers and copywriters about what works and what doesn't,
• Test before launching — don't launch a mistake that loses traffic,
• Remove "opinion-based discussions" (and guess-work) about what is seen,
• Costs as little as $1500 per study.

A PDF of this homepage redesign using Eyetools eyetracking can be found here (4 pages, 905 K, images of a site before/after, plus Eyetools heatmaps).

A homepage redesign guided by three Eyetools mini-studies yielded a 10x times increase of click-throughs.
Test #1 of Existing (old) Page	Test #2 of Prototypes	Test #3 of (new) "Best practices" Page	Launch
Most content wasn't seen. Most people preferred the competition.	3 prototypes generated based on data from test #1 (data not shown). Prototypes were quickly generated as images (can test image-mock-ups or HTML).	Most successful elements of each prototype from test #2 pulled together into a final prototype. Most content now seen. Most preferred this website over competitor. An entire column of paid-content was added, and was economically successful.	Click-throughs increased by 10x times. Satisfaction increased by double. Faster redesign — entire process took less than 45 days from start to launch (including the three tests) because all the parties involved agreed on what was working and what needed fixing.

Eyetracking a Navigation Bar -- how many elements are read? Well, it depends...

Changing one part of a webpage can affect viewing of other unrelated parts of the page (obvious, yes, but interesting to quantify the effect). This Eyetools before / after test showed that a right-hand navigation bar received significantly increased viewing (and usage) despite the fact that it did not change at all.
This post was originally posted here, but upon seeing this analysis, I wanted to take a second try at it, which you are now reading.

The Navigation Bar	Old Page Design	New Page Design
	·
Eyetools Heatmaps™ showing group viewing trends on each web page (Eyetools Heatmap Legend)

The San Francisco Police Department redesigned their homepage (see eyetracking heatmaps below for each site). Overall, the new homepage increased reading and time-on-page, while promoting more of the department's numerous services, both in terms of what people clicked on as well as the number of elements viewed and read.

The surprising thing was the effect the redesign had on their right Nav (which didn't get changed at all).

The behavior on these two identical navs on two different pages was strikingly (and statistically significantly) different: the nav on the new page was clicked by 64% of our test participants as opposed to only 14% on the old website. People looked at the new site's right nav longer, more often, and read more — despite there being no change to the design of the right navigation bar at all.

The moral of the story: A change on one part of the page can impact other, unrelated elements on the page. The right navigation bar was used completely differently on the new re-designed website because the content to the left of it changed.

Is this good or bad? Ultimately, that's up to the client to decide as it relates to the business goals of the page. However, in this case, it was good — it enabled visitors to quickly locate the specific content they wanted.

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...