People look at other people’s faces.
Did you know that the images of faces that capture people’s attention can be used to guide people around a website or an ad? I thought it was obvious! However, when I mentioned it to people at ad:tech Sydney they were amazed, so I realised it was worth posting about.
Here’s a little experiment with 106 people that I’ve demonstrated the eye tracker to over the last month or so. The image below is a sample gaze path of one person looking at a baby in a product ad:
The blobs are where the person has fixated on the image. You’ll notice the person starts looking in the middle of the page and then goes straight to the baby face. He focuses on it a few times, then moves his attention over to the text by his 7th fixation.
And here’s an image of that same baby looking up and toward the main content heading. Notice the person fixates less on the baby’s face and then quickly looks straight over to the text at the 5th fixation.
One person you say? Well, here’s a combined heat map of 106 people looking at the first image. The redder the spot, the more time people looked at it.
There is heaps of focus on the baby’s face and relatively little on the text. Here’s the same 106 people looking at the second image for the same amount of time:
Notice how many more people are actually reading the text that the baby is looking at in the above image? Not to mention the increased attention on the brand!
In advertising we will look at what the person we see in an ad is looking at. If they are looking out at us, we will simply look back at them and not really anywhere else.
Faces can be used to guide a person to key content and make sure they actually read it.
What are you looking at?
