Eye-Tracking Offers Glimpse Into Buyer's Decision-Making Process

An Interview with Cathleen Zapata, Metrics Marketing Group
By Claire Condra, About.com Guide

CLEVELAND, OH (March 28, 2011) - You have three seconds to capture the attention of a visitor to your site. Are you ready? Here goes...Time's up!

Studies show that within three seconds, a person has already made the decision to stay in your site, or go somewhere else. What can you do in such a short period of time, to keep the ball in your court?

Zapata has more than 15 years experience in quantitative and qualitative Eye-tracking technology offers a glimpse into the decision-making process by revealing exactly where the subject's eyes travel and how long they stay in any one place. Virtually anything that is designed to be looked upon can be tested -- it could be a website, email message, television commercial, product packaging, print advertisement, or brochure. The system creates a map of "hot spots" that show exactly where the subject's interest was drawn. And equally important, it shows the areas that were completely overlooked or avoided altogether.

Recently I had the opportunity to discuss this subject with Cathleen Zapata, Vice President of Research and Customer Experience for Metrics Marketing Group, a leader in usability testing. Their MetricsLab is one of the top usability testing facilities in the United States, and is equipped with state-of-the-art eye-tracking and observation technology. They also have a mobile unit for onsite testing.

Claire Condra: The subject of "observation technology" is so fascinating. Can you describe what goes on in a typical session?

Cathleen Zapata: The MetricsLab has some of the typical elements of a research facility, such as a one-way mirror and observation space. Some of the unique differentiators include real-time monitoring and analysis of the results as it's happening. Rather than rely on the one-way mirror, which is the more traditional way of observing, we also observe through screens. We have the large screen and other video and camera output to capture close-up views of the space. We can see exactly how the person is using the keyboard and mouse.

The lab is designed to simulate a natural environment with pictures on the wall, bookcases and plants. It helps with their comfort level to come into an environment that's not sterile -- so they don't feel like "lab rats," if you will.

Claire: How many people do you need for a good test group?

Cathleen: With a typical usability test, we recruit about eight to ten participants on the average, but more if we're incorporating eye-tracking. It's very different from a focus group, where you have more of a round-table discussion with lots of people giving subjective feedback. A usability test is focused on behavior. We want to know what they are actually doing. How are they navigating a website? At what point are they going to abandon -- and more importantly, why? In the typical usability study with eye tracking, we'll facilitate the study one-on-one, with predetermined scenarios and tasks for the session. It's very task oriented. They might be researching a product, finding a location, or purchasing something -- whatever those key tasks may be. Then we sit with them and take them through the typical tasks we are measuring. The most important thing we do is watch their behavior and gather feedback.

Claire: Are you ever surprised by what you learn?

Cathleen: We've spent thousands of hours with end users, doing usability testing and never fail to be surprised by what we learn.

A lot of it is figuring out key things that cause people to abandon a site, How many people are converting? A usability test is designed specifically to figure out the "why."

Maybe they don't understand the jargon, or don't see the error message on the page, or maybe they saw the error message, but don't know how to recover from it. Then other times, they may have different expectations when coming to a site. Maybe they're looking for very specific things. What makes them move forward to make a purchase? So we try to figure that out.

• Did they see the information?
• Is it enough detail?
• Is it too much?
• Are they becoming overwhelmed?

This is where eye tracking becomes a powerful addition to a usability study, because you can know, within those first three seconds, what they actually see.

Jakob Neilsen has done some interesting research into eye tracking and how people read websites.

There are commonalities with how people read. For example, English-speaking users read from left to right, which is why they often look at the upper-left corner of a website.

What we've seen is that the design can very easily manipulate, and we get different results from designs we test. The overall layout has a dramatic effect on peoples' attention. The size of images and placement, and the copy placement. Something as simple as putting a box around a certain piece of text has a dramatic effect on whether it's read or not. It's very powerful.

It's not uncommon to come away from a study with fifty to one-hundred or more findings from a single study. Then we prioritize the findings. The end deliverable of the study is a road map. We are able to say, "these are the findings that are critical and are causing people to abandon the site today, or causing people to pick up the phone to ask a question they could have found online. And we also document what's good about the site It's really about optimization, but at our core we are analytically driven.

Some of the things we find are low-hanging fruit that are easy to correct. We know through research that in just a few seconds, they'll decide, "is this worth my time?"

It could be a simple thing such as, incorporating your phone number on the landing page. Putting your phone number there in the upper-left hand corner lets users know that help is available if they need it. It reduces frustration and adds credibility. That's just one of the things you can do in that initial three seconds. We also know that within eight seconds, users decide if they're on the best path or not. So you need to get the message out there right away. From the user's perspective, they want to know, "What's in it for me?"

It's extremely important for a landing page to answer that question and get them started on the path quickly. People expect to complete the task at hand in less than a minute. There's very little time to engage them. You need to use that first point of contact on the landing page to engage them and quickly move forward to the next step.

Claire: Is there a single, sure-fire layout for a site?

Cathleen: We're often asked if there's a magic layout for a site. The rule of of thumb in the industry is, "If you design for everybody, you design for nobody." But there are definitely best practices to follow. For instance, there's a specific subset of Ecommerce best practices for checkout:

• Have a guest checkout option is becoming critical
• Make sure the overall flow and steps of checkout are clear
• Give them shipping options and a total amount early in the process, so they don't have to wait three or four pages for that information.

Claire: Where do you see the field of usability going in the future?

Cathleen: Usability in the web space is now really expected, and in the future we'll see a wider adoption of usability studies. It's not just as a one-time initiative. Many companies have adopted usability testing as a natural part of their process. Any time they are making a change to the site, they run it through usability testing. Then other companies just getting started, often quickly make it part of their process moving forward.

Claire: What would you say it the most important thing online merchants should keep in mind?

Cathleen: The first thing folks should realize is how fierce online competition is, and how task-oriented users are. We know that in just those first few seconds, they?ll decide if the site is worth their time. There are so many variables in the decision process -- that's the fun part of it -- getting to that "why" and then figuring it out.