Eye-Tracking Software Features to Utilize
Gazepoint offers professional-grade eye-tracking technology at a consumer price point, so anyone can join the race to develop new applications and gather important data. Not only is our hardware top of the line, but our eye-tracking software is also accessible and high quality. Learn more about what you can do with our UX or Professional Edition software, and order your eye-tracking technology package today!
Fixation Maps
What are fixation maps?
A fixation map offers a visual representation of a user’s fixations over time. Our eyes naturally jump from place to place as we read and scroll through a page, but when they stop in a certain place for a longer period of time, that is considered a fixation. It represents not only a location with x,y coordinates, but also an element of time.
How does it work?
With Gazepoint’s eye-tracking software, fixations appear as brightly colored circles overlaid across the stimulus a user interacted with, which may be a video, a picture, or a webpage. The circles grow larger as a user spends more time focused on that area. You can also follow short-term fixation sequences connected by lines.
Why utilize fixation maps?
Fixations mean a user is not just skimming the stimulus, but actively examining certain pieces of it. Fixations could mean an element is more meaningful, interesting, or engaging, but longer fixations typically mean they have found an element they find confusing or difficult to process. You can learn what parts of a stimulus capture your audience’s attention and what elements they prioritize as they navigate.
Heatmaps
What are heatmaps?
A heatmap is another way to visualize a user’s gaze over time. You can see what they are looking at and what elements draw their attention the most over time.
How does it work?
The major difference between heatmaps and fixation maps is not only the overall data they use to compile these visual representations, but also how they visualize that data. Rather than circles and lines, a heat map curates gazepoint data into a more amorphous form with color coding. Blue represents the gaze as a sort of baseline, and the more time a user spends looking at a specific point, the “hotter” that color becomes, transitioning through green, yellow, and red.
Why utilize heatmaps?
Heatmaps make it easy to quickly see what stimulus elements catch and hold a user’s attention. You can evaluate how your audience navigates a page and you can easily compare results from a range of participants.
Areas of Interest (AOIs)
What are “areas of interest”?
An area of interest, or AOI, represents a specific area within a stimulus that you have defined for the program. To learn how to choose an AOI, visit our YouTube channel for a quick video tutorial.
How does it work?
Once you define an AOI, the Gazepoint eye-tracking software will record specific metrics for that region. Those metrics can include when the area is first viewed, how long it was viewed, the percentage of time overall the area was viewed, and how often the user revisited that area.
Why utilize “areas of interest”?
AOIs are effective for collecting detailed information on a specific area of a stimulus, such as a new ad on a webpage. You can evaluate the performance of specific elements, such as videos or images, and compare the metrics of different regions to understand how they were prioritized by the user.
Explore More With Gazepoint Eye-Tracking Software
Investing in an effective and affordable eye tracker is simply the first step to building experiments and understanding the data your tracker collects. You also need a powerful software package. Gazepoint offers combination packages as well as options to buy the eye-tracking software you need a la carte. Visit our store to see what we have to offer, and place your order today.
