The eyes have it
30th November 2011
This interactive exercise on eye tracking was done as part of our World Usability Day event held at User Vision's head office.
The images we view in the world around us, in advertising, magazines, TV or the web, produce varying levels of emotional engagement. For organisations, understanding which images, or aspects of images, generate the most emotional engagement, allows them to improve the visual communication of their web-sites or campaigns to maximise impact.
In this study we looked specifically at luxury sports cars, examining which types of images have the most impact and if certain brands have more emotional impact.
What we looked at
We used an eye-tracking based system that measures the intensity of the sub-conscious emotional impact (arousal) that an image produces on the viewer.
Participants were presented with a series of images, at random, featuring four luxury sports cars in both a static “showroom” photo and a more dynamic “on the road” photo. Using the technology, we could see what caught the viewer’s attention, in what sequence and for how long. In addition, pupil dilation measurements gave an indication of the emotional impact of the image.
We then supplemented this data with a measure of the viewer’s image preferences, to see if this contradicted or supported the eye-tracking data.
Outcomes
Using the software and the data collected, we could determine:
- Which aspects of the cars drew the viewer’s attention the most
- Which type of photo had the greatest emotional response
- Which model had the greatest impact
In addition, we could compare this data with the viewer preference information to determine if the images that produced greater emotional impact were also preferred when reviewed in retrospect.
The full results from this study will be available on the User Vision site in the near future.
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This article was written by Stephen Denning. Stephen is a Senior User Experience Consultant at User Vision, a usability and accessibility consultancy that helps clients gain a competitive advantage through improved ease of use.
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