5 ways to use eye tracking to improve website operations

If your website’s user experience is poor, you are likely to lose a lot of conversion opportunities.

Eye tracking is an effective tool for helping website operators and designers understand how users browse websites. Many authoritative experts and institutions have been conducting research in this field for decades.

Below are five conclusions about eye tracking applications that may be of some help to your website operations.

1. User behavior patterns are predictable

In 2006, researcher Jakob Nielsen found that, by and large, the way we browse the web follows a predictable pattern.

Users will quickly scan the main content of the web page in a few seconds using an F-shaped viewing pattern.

• First, they scan the web page from left to right;
• Then, they return to the left side of the page and begin browsing rightward again further down;
• Finally, they return to the left and begin scrolling down the page.

Nielsen found this F-shaped trend across three types of websites: About Us pages, e-commerce , and search engine results pages. He found that the F pattern is universal — “like a carefully programmed user browsing behavior”

Tips: Knowing that users navigate your site in an F-shaped pattern, make sure your most important content and call-to-action buttons follow this path.

Notice how the landing page below utilizes the F-shaped pattern. A website user’s attention will follow the red arrow and eventually reach the free trial sign-up page.

2. The “F”-shaped browsing pattern will also fail

If you compare the two types of access behaviors, searching with a specific goal and browsing aimlessly, you will find that they have completely different browsing patterns.

“In the case of aimless browsing, users looked at all the content line by line from left to right until they reached the bottom of the page. In the case of searching, their eye movements were very irregular and seemed to skip across the page.”

This study shows that when users have a clear goal, they are likely to abandon their usual eye movement habits and browse more casually to find the goal quickly. This may be because people have a natural urge to seek out information more quickly when they know exactly what they want.

If you’ve used heatmap tools , you’ll notice that sometimes the navigation bar on a website gets a lot of clicks. This may be a trace left by a user with clear intentions. Let's look at an example:

Taking the picture as an example, using the heat map of a website presented by Ptengine (Platinum Analysis), we can directly see that a large number of clicks are concentrated in the navigation part. There are two possibilities for this to happen:

• The navigation design is too distracting, causing users to jump to other places without browsing the content of this page;
• Some old users (returning visitors) browse with a purpose.

By segmenting and comparing new and returning users in Ptengine's heat map, you can easily determine the type of user access behavior on your website.

Note: When you find that all new visitors also generate a large number of clicks on the navigation bar and there is no depth of visit, it means that there is a problem with your navigation bar design, because you generally want new visitors to browse all the contents of the page before jumping to other pages.

Tips to Takeaway: Make a list of specific goals for what your users want from your website. Because it is difficult to predict what your website users want, it is important to use heatmap tools like Ptengine to do some specific click-through rate testing.

3. Visual experience is very important

Last October, SEO moz published a study of Google search results pages. On the video search results page, we found that the first thumbnail is much more eye-catching than the second one.

“Although it is difficult to draw a clear conclusion from individual experimental results, it does prove that the test subjects’ attention is always focused on the first video thumbnail, and they often ignore the best matching results in other forms, as well as other thumbnails.”

Tips for packaging: People pay a lot of attention to what comes first, and if it happens to be something visually appealing, it will grab all your attention.

4. Users will ignore the large banner on the homepage

In a 2007 study, Jakob Nielsen used the term “banner blindness” to describe this trend: people have become increasingly accustomed to ignoring advertisements. In the study, Nielsen said:

“We have confirmed countless times that users are blind to banner ads. It doesn’t matter if the banner is an ad or not, as long as it looks like an ad, users will not look at it.”

This phenomenon was once again confirmed during the analysis using the Ptengine (Platinum Analysis) heat map.

The first screen of the shoe manufacturer’s official website is a large running shoe banner. First of all, it is definitely not an advertisement, but it can be seen from the click heat map that compared with the navigation and the content below the first screen, almost no one is willing to click on the banner. If more content that users care about can be placed in this "real estate bidding king" position, it is likely to bring users a better experience and even more conversions.

Tips package: Of course, there are exceptions. The use of large banners is generally suitable for scenarios where traffic is directed to the website through online advertising, but you must monitor the behavior of advertising traffic on your website and measure the return on investment (ROI).

5. Pursuing differentiation may cost you a lot

Blue has long been the color of links on web pages because it has become an intuitive signal for people to take action.

Traditionally, when people visit a new website, they first browse to the familiar areas that they have visited on most other websites; users are used to using their experience to experience new things.

Over the past twenty years or so, people have become accustomed to certain fixed usage patterns on the web (including the fact that blue represents links). Choosing a different color to represent links is not completely wrong, but it will greatly affect the speed at which users can find content.

Tips Packed: More Than Just Link Color. When you build a website, you must be fully aware of the existence of online conventions. Abiding by established conventions is the best way to ensure the efficiency of website use.

Summarize

After reading this, do you also want to do some relevant research on your own? Of course, using eye tracking to study user browsing behavior is very expensive, but you can use some more affordable tools and solutions (such as Ptengine) to use visual analysis such as click, attention, and scroll reach heatmaps to improve user experience and increase conversions.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @Ptmind was compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!