Where can I get an eye tracking study for my website?

Eye tracking is a technology that allows you to see your website through your users' eyes. It lets you see where they look, what they pay most attention too, and what they miss. To understand how eye tracking studies work, it might be helpful to know how the human eye works.

Human sight has a visual field of about 120 degrees. There are three degrees of visuality in this spectrum, which are foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral vision. We primarily take in visual data from the outside world through the fovea. We move our head and eyes to focus the fovea on things that we want to see.

Eye movement has two states:
 Saccade: A saccade is the fastest movement of which the human body is capable of making and is what centers things within the foveal area.
 Fixation: A fixation occurs when saccade movement stops and allows to eye to take in the content.

During saccadic activity, we cannot see anything. Only through fixations are we able to perceive the world visually. In other words, the brain only translates sight as what we acquire during successive fixations.

This information is helpful in understanding how an eye-tracker works. An eye-tracker is an instrument that is capture data about both saccadic activity and fixations of the foveal area. It does this by using an infrared light source to illuminate the eyes, a sensor to capture a reflection of the eyes, and eye-gaze analysis software to process the data.

By using a remote, digital eyetracker, researchers can record saccades and fixations, the length of each fixation, the distance to the eye, the pupils' diameter, and a lot of other useful data within an accuracy of half a degree. Thus, eyetracking can, for example, tell us what a user is looking at and for how long.

There are companies out there that provide services for eye tracking studies to determine for you how to best design your user interface elements like navigation systems, menus, and forms for effective ad placement. One such company is called Etre. They will work with you to understand who your target audience is and then recruit people who match that description.

They will then typically test this group of people in 8-10 sessions, during which participants are given a series of real-life tasks to accomplish using your website. Each participant is using eye tracking equipment that records the path of their eyes and what they fixate on.

After analysing the test data, they will provide you with a detailed report, illustrated with session images and heatmaps for each of your webpages. Session images show the path that users' eyes took when looking at a page, while heatmaps highlight the areas the users paid most attention to. They will also present you with their design recommendations.

Some companies at that point may give you the option of having them implement the short-term fixes that they recommended. They can also develop proposals for future redesign activities to address the deeper usability and customer experience issues.

In order to have an eye tracking study done for your website, you need to plan on it taking several weeks. It could take a week or two to recruit study participants, depending on your target market. After recruiting participants, the preparation, testing, analysis and reporting will normally only take 5-10 days.

In summary, eye tracking studies are comprehensive and can be expensive. The best place to find companies that perform these studies is on the internet. Be selective and research carefully to find a reputable company to conduct the study on your website.

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