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Be inspired

You are in the last decades of the 19th century and want to understand how people read through a page of text. There is no such thing as an eye tracker (yet!) so what do you do?

You invent one!

That’s how the first “eye tracker” was born in the late 1800s, by Edmund Burke Huey. Readers had to wear lenses with only a small opening, that had a pointer attached. This allowed Huey to observe where they were looking and study which words they paused on. In essence it’s not much different to modern eye-tracking applications and just goes to show that it does take a bit of a great mind (with a little bit of that creative craziness) to come up with something simple and effective to address a challenge.

Be bold

OK, so this is not a history lesson, so why this intro? Chris and I had a discussion the other day about innovation and risk and how we can drive innovation for our clients. Granted, some will be more open than others, but can we help our clients take a bolder approach to things? Try new and not-so-well-tested techniques?

Well, my favourite example is… Marmite (ok, stay with me here)!  I really like their playful, self-deprecating approach to advertising, which they’ve also introduced to social media, by inviting users to post ‘like’ or ‘hate’ videos on Facebook in exchange for… free Marmite cereal bars! Most recently they’ve launched a tongue-in-cheek campaign that pokes fun at all those parliamentary candidate interviews, giving promises about changing the world (one marmite bar at a time).

Love it or hate it!

Allowing (and actually inviting) ‘uncontrolled’ negative content on your social media page would have been concidered mad some time ago, but it takes a bold few to create a new trend. As brands evolve towards being more open and honest with their customers I’m sure we’ll see more and more of this boldness (cue HSBC’s First Direct, O2 etc).

Be different

The question though remains: how can we best help our clients be innovative and stand out of the competition? The answer is by being different - in a positive sort of way! We are different from other agencies and each of our clients is a new and different challenge for us. Most of the briefs we get usually require ‘best practice’, tried and tested solutions that work well for the majority of users and are usualy safe and guaranteed to work. Now - don’t get me wrong - this is great and for some projects that’s all that is needed. But the truth is that it will rarely make a website (and, in turn a brand) unique, standing out from the competition. It surely helps towards a good user experience and happy customers - but in today’s competitive world (online and offline) that’s just not enough to grab everyone’s attention.

We are here to help you go that extra mile for your customers. We love creating unique experiences and with techniques like behavioural targeting and multivariate testing, you can ensure you always get the best results possible. Call Chris now on 0207 1991 321 to have a chat about how we can help you stand out from the competition.

eye-tracking, interface design, usability design, user centred design Design, eye-tracking, ideas, innovation, inspiration

Tobii eye tracker

During March and April we are adding eye tracking for free to all of our usability research labs.

The use of eye tracking to support other lab based research methodologies has greatly improved over the past couple of years with the development of reliable, stable hardware and software tools from Tobii.

Quick set up and the fact that the eye tracking hardware is housed in an unobtrusive way, in fact you can’t actually see it, means we can now integrate this research into our labs without the worry of system crashes half way through a session.

Leading experts

Becky Tindle, who previously worked at Bunnyfoot’s London research labs as Usability and Accessibility Consultant, has long been an advocate of eye tracking as a method of investigating user behaviour during lab based research.

Becky added, “eye tracking is an excellent tool that enables you to see your product through users’ eyes. Used whilst observing behaviour as users interact on screen and talk aloud, it can be a powerful tool. We also encourage the use of retrospective protocol where appropriate, for example, during summative lab sessions.”

BT Vision eye tracking

However, eye tracking is not a magic solution to the needs of all research projects and often we advise against testing using eye tracking as results can be misleading depending on the interface being researched and the audience researching it.

This approach goes against a number of established agencies who are guilty of pushing eye tracking on a client because it’s glamorous and tangible. Be warned, in the wrong hands or on the wrong project, eye tracking will do more harm than good.

usability research eye-tracking, eyetracking, navigation, usability