Adopting Eye Tracking For User Experience Studies
Gone are the days when people had to wait for the weekend to go out for shopping or stand in long queues at the checkout counter. Today’s era is dominated by much simpler, hassle-free, and round the year sale on websites. It is an entirely different game now where websites are investing massive time and revenue to lure customers on their sites. The lack of physical contact with the customers has made it difficult for retailers to understand the customer’s needs. It is this dearth that makes the use of eye-tracking indispensable for the online selling marketplace. Now, it’s all about the perception of the customer towards a particular product which makes him/her click on the “BUY” option.
Benefits of Eye Tracking in e-Commerce
There are various elements in a website which contribute towards driving the sales for the companies. Eye-tracking helps in identifying these elements along with any loopholes so that the corrective rectification, modification can be done as per the findings. In this blog, we take a look at some of the areas in the e-commerce industry where eye-tracking can prove to be highly beneficial.
1. Website Design
The very first thing that anyone notices when visiting a website is its design. The overall look of the website acts as an important factor in the consumer engagement process. It is imperative to have an appealing design so that the consumers get the feeling of the brand value and the authenticity of the company.
Eye-tracking helps in analyzing the consumer’s perception regarding the design of the website. The gaze points and the duration of the stay on the website and its elements provide the input of the website’s likeability. The same can be interpreted through heat maps which shows the gaze pattern of the consumers.
Amazon is an excellent example of this. In the past couple of years, Amazon’s indigenous products’ sale has seen quite a boost. And eye-tracking has a big contribution to make that possible. Earlier, their indigenous products were listed further down in their category section. With the help of eye-tracking, it was found that users almost never spent enough time that further down the list. An F-shape gaze pattern was recognized where the gaze points rapidly decreased from top to bottom and left to right. So, they made changes in the list and moved the products from bottom to top (as shown in the image below).
2. Product Information
When buying a product, most users tend to read the product description. It is important that the language used to describe a product and the length of the description should be easily readable and optimum. This can be analyzed through eye-tracking. When a person doesn’t understand the language, the gaze duration increases as they tend to spend more time trying to read and understand.
Another important aspect where eye tracking helps is in determining whether consumers are engaging with the product page in the right way or not. The heat maps indicate where the consumers focus most on when they visit a page. If a consumer spends more time viewing the ‘recommendation’ section rather than the product description or images, then an appropriate approach can be taken to shift consumer’s attention. The page can be revamped in a way that the consumer spends maximum time reading or viewing our own product rather than the competitor’s products.
3. User Experience
In the digital world, the need for grabbing the attention of potential customers is of great importance. The player who makes innovative offers with the right business plan can be successful against the honchos of industries. Therefore, this segment is often termed as “Attention Economy”.
For companies like Amazon, eBay, etc steering the attention of visitors or buyers is crucial for their business to succeed. Eye-tracking studies provide insight into what users actually perceive and the time duration they spent on the website.
User journey plays an equally important role in bringing out useful aspects of a user’s engagement with the website. Using eye-tracking, the user journey can be traced to analyze how seamless the whole experience is. The analysis can help in improving the major pain points of the users while navigating through the website to make it user-friendly.
In the internet market, decisions are based on the quantitative data which eye-tracking studies help in achieving. With the help of eye-tracking, companies can get quantitative data on the perception, usability, and speed of the user’s behavior. This data helps in increasing the user-friendliness. Without eye tracking there can only be subjective, verbal opinions that won’t be of much help.
Eye-tracking, therefore, helps in the conversion rate optimization. It even becomes possible to quantify the return on investment of such studies.
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