

Landing page neuroscience: which flight search engine has the best landing? - wheels
http://whitematter.de/blog/flight-search-engines-whos-got-the-most-attention-friendly-landing-page

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pg
You don't have to guess where users will look on a page. You can measure it:
<http://www.gazehawk.com/>.

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kilio
5 days >> 1 minute

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edwardcooke
This is awesome. I had a quite fun time allowing my eyes to play over the
pages as if I was looking at them to book a flight and took the care to make a
summary retrospective note of where my eyes had travelled.

I'm normally completely unaware of where my eyes move on a page.
Interestingly, I found that when I switched my view from the normal to the
eye-quant diagram, it was immediately apparent that they'd got it harrowingly
right. They really do seem to have the play of my attention pretty much down.
Almost scary.

This gets me thinking. I don't know what eyequant's business model is, but it
occurs to me that they could do an amusing sideline in training web-designers
accurately to anticipate where people will look when they see web-pages. I
feel that if I did 300 normal/eyequant pairs in sequence, I could gradually
become aware both of my eye-movements, and also of those that people would
normally make.

I'm reminded of the research that shows that the feedback loops available to
doctors who predict disease from x-rays is too slow, so that often their
skills deteriorate without them knowing as their career progresses. It was
shown that if these doctors are given x-rays from the past to judge _where the
results are already known_ , so that they can then be given immediate
feedback, their skills quickly recover and then improve. Feedback's obviously
vital to learning.

Graphic designers, even if their web-pages are being A/B tested the whole
time, just don't get sufficiently speedy and dense feedback to ever gain
anything but the most rudimentary skill in anticipating where people's
attention will go.

Eyequant seems to have this nailed. Guess that's what you get with Christoph
Koch on your team. But it would be pretty awesome if the technology could be
used to help make graphic designers (or anyone indeed) to become aware of the
forces on their attention.

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arkitaip
As a HCI nerd I find this tech very interesting but I am skeptical about the
extraordinary claim that EyeQuant - the technology developed and employed by
Whitematter labs in this analysis - can, "predicts within seconds where users
will look and what users will see" [1]. Where is the equally extraordinary
evidence? Any kind of prediction of human behavior is very hard and subject to
all kinds of exceptions. For instance, are the predictions applicable to all
people wrt age, gender, culture, etc? What about something as basic as people
whose language are Right-to-left (arabic, hebrew)? I haven't found any
information in English that offers any scientific explanation how EyeQuant
performs its predictions.

[1] <http://eyequant.com/>

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fab1an
Hi Arkitaip,

glad you asked - (I'm one of co-founders of EyeQuant.)

In a nutshell, EyeQuant's predictions use a model of human attention that is
based on hundreds of empirical eye-tracking studies, which were conducted at
the Neurobiopsychology Lab at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany - also,
we're cooperating with Caltech and USC.

The models _only_ represent the cultural background of tracked subjects - it's
strictly data-driven. Our current model is representative for western
subjects; it can't predict, e. g., people who usually read Farsi. It also
_only_ predicts the first 3-5 seconds.

Here's the method: In the eye-tracking studies, we present subjects with
websites from different categories and track their fixations - more
importantly, we also analyze the statistical features of the fixated spots
(around 50 of them to date): color contrasts, luminance, shapes and location,
to name a few of the very basic ones.

In the next step we build models based on the weight of these features and
evaluate them with _other_ eye-tracking studies as a gold standard. One eye-
tracking study typically predicts another one with 90-95% accuracy for the
first few seconds (ROC). With EyeQuant, and after 5 years of foundational
research, we achieve around 84% predictive accuracy - that's pretty close to
what you'll get with an empirical study, but the results are available within
seconds.

Let me know if you have more questions!

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arkitaip
Thanks for providing more information about EyeQuant. One thing that I wonder
about is how sensitive your system is wrt the customer's users. If I am
running a gaming site where most users are men between ages 12-39, will you
only use data from test subjects that share similar characteristics?

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wanderingstan
It's cool that the young upstarts have the better UI. In a sense, it makes
sense that the advertisements on Expedia and Orbitz are so distracting:
advertising is _supposed_ to grab attention! I wonder how much money these big
players are making off these ads, and if it is enough to counter-act the
effect of a poor UI. Over time users will discover HipMonk and other travel
sites and won't come back.

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TorKlingberg
Hipmunk is great, but I could not actually book a flight there. For that I was
sent to Orbitz, which showed a long list of flights along with the one I
already selected.

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kn0thing
Thanks for bringing this up - why couldn't you book a flight on hipmunk?

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TorKlingberg
I was booking between Europe and Asia. When I have chosen the legs it says:
Book this trip! Buy on Orbitz ($824) No other choice.

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ajays
I'm curious: what kind of a business model does EyeQuant have?

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fab1an
Hi Ajays,

we're offering EyeQuant as SaaS - you can book different flat rate
subscriptions, starting at $199, or pre-paid packages for single projects...

