Eye Tracking Research is for Everyone!

If you had shown up to take part in an eye tracking study in the 1960s at the laboratory of Russian Psychologist Alfred Yarbus, you might have had some concerns about what you had gotten yourself into. Perhaps the sterile, soviet lab environment would not have bothered you. Perhaps you would have been unphased by the large metal “apparatus” on which you would be asked to rest your chin during data collection. But when he unveiled the suction cups and informed you that they would be attached directly on your eyeballs, you may have started looking for the nearest exit.

 

 

Eye tracking has come a long way since those early days. The industry has ditched the suction cups, but held onto the innovative spirit, as the systems used to collect data on human attention have become more accurate, less intrusive, and better suited to just about every testing scenario. In today’s world of marketing research and UX, the eye tracker has evolved into an indispensable tool for businesses seeking to fully understand the customer experience. And not just for the Microsofts and Googles and Coca-Colas of the world. Eye tracking research is for everyone now!

 

Eye tracking is for anyone with a webcam

Alfred Yarbus would likely have been shocked by the knowledge that one day a small camera attached to your telephone or computer could be used as an eye tracker. Advancements in consumer electronic components and cloud-based algorithms have enabled many types of studies to be conducted in this way, remotely with participants sampled from the comfort of their own homes – no special equipment required, no need to travel to a research facility.For testing of advertising, package design, and other types of simple stimuli the accuracy of a webcam is sufficient, and the low cost makes it massively scalable.

This technological innovation has opened the door for many researchers who desire hard, quantitative data on consumer attention, but lack the funding and infrastructure to run a big-time in-person attention lab. There are, of course, some constraints to this lower-fidelity approach (shorter sessions, less precision), but if you are interested in simple answers about whether a new commercial, online ad, or package design will catch the eye, it’s an excellent tool.

 

 

Wearables move research out of the lab and into the wild

Eye tracking has also made great strides for more complex research applications like user experience, media consumption, and path to purchase studies, which require high-precision systems rather than webcams. For most of the history of eye tracking, the complexity of set-up and calibration made it difficult to execute a project “in the wild.” You had to have a lab to run your research and someone with a bunch of letters after their name to make sure it worked properly or else you couldn’t study visual attention. But then came the latest generation of wearable systems, like Tobii Pro Glasses 3, just as the research industry as a whole was turning its focus away from the focus group and toward more naturalistic methods, more immersive tools, and a more “fly on the wall” approach to insights.

Wearable eye tracking scratched this itch exceptionally well, in that it allowed companies to put eye tracking glasses on a shopper in the store or an app-user on the subway or a cook in the kitchen or a driver behind the wheel and capture precisely what grabs attention, what gets ignored, and how it relates to purchase and usage choices. You don’t have to disturb the natural experience, you don’t have to have a lab, and the setup is so simple that anyone can be a technician. In fact, for many studies of this type, there is no technician at all. The participants in the study collect the data on their own.

 

 

Combine research methods for maximum insights

The result of webcams and wearables knocking down the barriers to adoption has been an influx of researchers from myriad industries with different backgrounds who have brought along their own unique research perspectives. They have also brought along their own research methods, which is great because eye tracking plays well with others. By that I mean that this tool works best when combined with other approaches. Seeing what the customer sees is great, but what if you could also know what they think, what they feel, and what they do? As the industry and technology have evolved, so has the synergy between eye tracking and complimentary tools. This is true for traditional techniques such as in-depth interviews and surveys, which are now seamlessly integrated into the eye tracking testing experience. It’s similarly true for tools like facial-expression coding, galvanic skin response, and EEG, which provide even more insight into the inner-experience of the consumer. The ability to run a study that provides data on what people see, what they touch, what they buy, how it affects them physiologically, and what they say afterwards…wow, that’s powerful.

 

 

The World of Eye Tracking Research is Ever-Expanding

Personally, I don’t go back as far as the Yarbus days, but I have been in the eye tracking industry for a while now. When I got my start as a researcher fifteen years ago, it was rare to run a study of more than thirty participants because of time and resource constraints. It was rare to turn around results in less than three weeks because the software was inefficient. And it was rarer still that the budget came in under 30K because – to be perfectly frank – eye tracking was simply not ready to provide value at a reasonable cost.

Improvements in hardware, software, and evolving “agile” approaches to insights have revolutionized how quickly, inexpensively, and quantitatively eye tracking research can be done. A study that used to require technicians to travel all over the country might now be conducted remotely using a webcam software platform, like Sticky by Tobii Pro. A research question that was once unanswerable because the eye tracker was chained to the lab can now be explored unobtrusively in a real environment. An analysis task that used to take days of manual work might now take only minutes. These improvements mean that more brands have been able to build eye tracking into their own processes and more research vendors are able to offer eye tracking as a core service. Having your own attention research program is no longer a luxury that only the biggest companies in the world can afford.

It’s truly an exciting time to be a part of this field, in which everyone seems to be simultaneously discovering the power of eye tracking and weaving it into their research DNA.  Eye tracking has, at last, been democratized!

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels