Today on the Google Blog there’s an interesting post about how Google performs eye-tracking studies to improve the quality of search results. The idea is simple – track where people look on the page. By learning more about how our brain looks for information, they can improve how they present information – essentially improving the quality of communication between user and the web.
This is a great way to learn how people find search results, but why not take it a step further and learn how people interact with websites and ads? Currently, I can record how long users stay on a page and where they click. But what if we increase that resolution a step further? Obviously tracking a user’s eye movement is infeasible due to a lack of hardware support on the user end. Here’s my work-around.
I don’t know about you, but as I scan a webpage I subconsciously move the cursor around the page as well. My cursor might hover over a paragraph as I’m reading it, or even move along line by line. I’ll move the cursor down a list of links until I find the one I’m looking for. Essentially I am projecting where I am looking through the location of my cursor. Why not start capturing not only clicks, but where the cursor hovers on the page? Imagine if this information could be analyzed in the advertising world. Advertisers could use several ads and compare not only click-through-rates, but also how many people “looked” at the ad and decided not to click.
What are some other possibilities?
