Why eye tracking?
When it comes to eye-tracking and its usefulness (or uselessness) in the application to sites, the main and, practically, the only objection to such testing is its supposedly meaninglessness. The same thoughts are repeated almost verbatim: a competent designer will make out everything correctly; just read a couple of books and do as it is written; no device will show anything new and the like ...
And in an ideal world everything would be just that. However, in our real one, mistakes are found quite often, and various kinds of design flaws have one very unpleasant feature: they are very difficult to calculate. For example, you placed an advertisement on your site or a link to some useful information - but there are few clicks on this link ... How to find out what it is - whether the content is uninteresting, the text of the link is unclear, the topic is really uninteresting ... And maybe Do visitors just not see your link?
Some time ago, our company tested several popular CMS (content management systems) and found a rather interesting situation. The two most popular CMS in Russia ( 1s-Bitrix and UMI CMS) there is the opportunity to test their system on a demo site, with links to demo sites located on the main page and highlighted quite clearly. But almost half of the visitors do not notice them!
The situation with UMI CMS is especially indicative. The link to the demo site is located in the “right” place - the upper right corner of the menu is highlighted and it would seem that there should be no problems finding it. However, out of 10 subjects who were given the task of finding a demo site, only 6 people saw this link “from the first call”. True, it should be noted that of the remaining four, two noticed this button, being somewhere on the internal pages, and two more got to the demo site "in an alternative way", selecting "try on the demo site" in the download section. Here's what the “attention map” of the main page of the site looks like until the first click: And this is an example of the search for the “cherished button” by one of the respondents:
The situation with Bitrix is slightly different: they have many different products and sections and, although the button is on the main page, it is not placed in the main menu and is called “test”, which not all subjects associated with the demo site. As a result, the link was found again by 6 out of 10 subjects, two more managed to get to the demo site in a roundabout way, and two asked the operator for help. And a video with an example search:
But if for CMS this situation is not very critical - the choice of CMS is quite limited and the potential buyer is likely to spend additional time finding the right link - then for areas with higher competition, losing half of the potential buyers can be very unpleasant. Even more unpleasant is the fact that such a loss occurs due to the fact that the site owners simply do not suspect the problem, since traditional testing methods do not make it possible to detect such errors.
Unfortunately, testing on the eye-tracker only allows you to see what is happening now, but cannot tell you “how to do it”. However, based on this information, the designer is likely to be able to come up with some kind of solution that corrects the discovered flaws. It is also important that various methods of website promotion and promotion require, as a rule, constant investments, while testing and “optimization” of a design is a one-time job that allows you to increase website conversion. Just keep in mind that changing the design leads to a change in perception, so it is highly advisable not to forget to test the new version ...