Heat maps are widely helpful for a few simple reasons: researchers, designers and marketers are interested in a set of points where users focus their attention on the content. These eye-opening tools are beneficial for understanding people’s attention and actions to improve a whole lot of aspects of life starting from the structure of the web page and ending with the design of the product packaging. In this article, we are going to outline simple concepts of eye tracking heatmaps and touch upon its possible alternative.
What is eye tracking heatmaps?
Eye tracking heatmaps show the areas on a screen or even an object on which the user tends to focus. They take colour coding where the “hot” colours like red or orange represent the areas which receive most of the focus while the “cool colours like blue or green, depict a less viewed zone/area. These heatmaps are produced by complicated eye tracking facility that records and tracks eye movements and fixations.
How do they work?
Various eye tracking devices work with infrared light and high-resolution cameras and their main goal is to register movement of the pupils. While watching a particular stimulus, the participants’ line of sight is monitored by the system to know where they look and for how long. From this data, multiple users are compiled to produce a heatmap to demonstrate the pattern of visual attention.
Benefits of eye tracking heatmaps:
- Objective data: Heat mapping makes it easier to establish quantitative data regarding the users’ activities, unlike the traditional feedback where one has to depend on how the user felt.
- Intuitive visualization: In addition, large and intricate data is well explained and this make the information to be easily understandable by all the stakeholders, regardless of their discipline backgrounds.
- Identifying problem areas: Speed up when it comes to identifying portions that are not receiving enough attention or, on the other hand, when specific parts seem to dominate the rest of the material.
Limitations to consider:
While eye tracking heatmaps are powerful, they do have some limitations:
- Cost: One disadvantage which may be associated with eye tracking equipment is that quality types can be costly.
- Time-consuming: The establishment of studies and subsequent analysis of results is quite a strenuous task.
- Laboratory setting: May not be inherently characteristic by the viewers or how they would naturally watch TV.
Heatmap alternatives:
One of the heatmap alternatives is Zipy. Unlike traditional eye tracking heatmaps, Zipy provides a suite of features that go beyond visual attention tracking:
- Session Replay: The feature of Zipy lets you observe how users work on your site or app in real time; you can see how clients engage with your site or how a customer uses your application.
- Error Tracking: It has the ability to identify and work on problems that might be making users clumsy and this helps the developers get to the root of the problems swiftly.
- Performance Monitoring: Zipy records a wide range of parameters that help to identify critical points which slow down your application and make it unresponsive.
Conclusion
Eye tracking heat maps can be described as a tool enabling presentation of user attention and use patterns in the most effective manner. So, by incorporating this technology as an addition to other research methodologies and heatmap substitutes, a business and other investigator can get the insights they need to develop better and more user-friendly designs. Consequently, eye tracking heatmaps should contribute even further to building and designing the current and future digital and physical environments.
