People look at other people’s faces.
In this video I showed that even my 11 month old son looks straight at faces shown to him in Facebook! It is habitual.
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 was at ad:tech Sydney 09 last week I mentioned it to people, and they were amazed! I realised it was worth posting about it!
Here’s a little experiment with 106 people that I’ve demonstrated the Tobii T60 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 (we planned it that way by using a fixation cross between each stimuli) and then goes straight to the baby face. He focusses 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 he 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 (The images were shown in a to everyone in a random order on Tobii Studio software running with a Tobii T60 eye tracker).
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’s attention to key content and make sure they actually read it.
What are you looking at?
Hi James
I couldn’t agree more with you. I have seen the same thing in the past (see here: http://blobfisk.com/initial-takeway-findings-from-eye-tracking/). We’ve used these results to influence our image strategy and as information for advertisers.
I would add another thing about faces, and that is recall. I’ve mixed eye tracking with some task based testing in the past, and one of the things that flagged up is that people recall ads with faces far, far more than any other type of advert.
So, faces mean that not only will the chance of users seeing your ad go up, so will the recall of your ad/brand.
Thanks to @BrettSinclair for your tweet and link to Bunnyfoot - Eye tracking Results - “You look where they look” http://budurl.com/x5pf - That confirms the BunnyFoot study http://budurl.com/b97y
I wonder how this relates to what has been termed “engagement”? I would guess from my own thoughts and feelings that others might get more of an emotional feeling from the piece with the baby looking directly at them (at least I did). Could this test possibly also demonstrate or suggest some sort of a separation between cognitive (they read more content-baby facing content) and emotional (looked at the face facing foward longer) engagement? I wonder which ad would perform better with a recall test? I.e. if there is a difference in emotional and cognitive engagelment, which would be recalled better? Just curious!
Thanks and Hi Nick!
Anyone seen any?
I reckon there needs to be a little more research on this! Perhaps there is some out there already. I need to have a look
JB
This is totally awesome. It should have been so obvious - but at the same time completely stupid because of course the face isn’t really looking at anything at all. Its just a picture! In our relaxed, private minds though we just go with the idea that it IS looking at something. This is great psychology. I’m wondering now what other sorts of images would have an influence, like traffic moving in one direction, or arrows? Birds flying in a certain direction? Wow! This is great!
thanks, glad you enjoyed it
Interesting study James, i wonder if this would be the case if the layout in the example was different, if say, the headline was much larger. This example only proves the “Rule of thirds” .
These findings have been around for some while but this is one of the best article about it. It’s straight to the point.
Now the problem is how to elegantly integrate any human face into a site design. It’s easy to just put a picture there but not so to make it unobtrusive.
Wow that’s really interesting. I didn’t even know there was such thing as an eye-tracker.
Thanks Yang! I hope to do some more tracking on faces and develop the theory.
wow so interesting
It’s useful for me. Thanks for your article.
Thanks for posting this. Very interesting. I have a question though: why only 106 people? I work with sites that receive millions of uniques a month and 106 people doesn’t even come close to the number of people who do not have Flash install, or javascript turned on, or are visually impaired.
Hi Jason,
It’s simply research and each person has to be tested individually, face-to-face.
106 is way more than enough to produce a statistically significant effect. Meaning that the results can be generalized across the population of users looking at faces.
Hope this helps.
James
Gudone and new tooooo
Great post and a very elegant study, James! I described your findings in my post here: http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/baby-heat-maps.htm
Roger
Why thank you!
Hi again James. I appreciate your reply, but your answer doesn’t really help me. Producing a statistical effect is, to me, like saying “I made a book because it has a cover and pages within”. Can you give us more detail of the study: 1) How were people selected 2) What were their genders 3) What was their cultural background 5) Ages 6) Were they given an eye exam before the eye tracking test 7) If so, what were their results
Did any of them have physical disabilities 9) What operating system were they using during the time of the test 10) what browser 11) what screen resolution 12) What is the average number of hours these people spend on the net (are they power users or skimmers).
What you’ve given us here is only the essence of the study, which is great, but what I’m learning here, I feel, is very biased and I still feel very ignorant of critical information that I could find useful for creating web sites.
Thanks for your time.
James, thanks for this post. I remember many years ago having a similiar realization about how very young kittens would look directly at my face…even as I towered over them. They had that same relational desire - they wanted to be fed and knew that the big person was the source of that yet they also knew I had a face to appeal to! (rather than just rubbing up against my legs). Fascinating stuff.
LOL! We have (very seriously for a client) tried to track dogs with a tracker but their eyes are on the side of their head and it doesn’t work. Although you can track apes http://bit.ly/1UtZnO Would a cat sit still long enough to try?! Mm. Maybe not… I’d get too much hayfever to be bothered!
Thanks!!
Great article! Thanks for sharing. I’m interested to see how this will influence my designs in the future.
I remember a well-known offline marketer saying that when he had his picture looking away from his text, not only did his ad not work as well - but the adjacent ad that he was ‘looking at’ did much better!
WOW, that was some great tips to use on some of my sites. I will definitely be using some of these techniques.
Thanks a lot!
That’s very interesting and valuable! thanks for sharing
James,
Thanks for the post. I could not agree with you more. I wrote about the same thing a while back on my blog: http://wp.me/pwfa1-mN. With a little bit of thought and effort, people can really raise their game when it comes to presentations. For a fascinating look at the psychology related to this topic, you should look at this great article by Les Posen: http://lesposen.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/faces/.
All the best for 2010!
John Zimmer
yup, the knowledge of heatmaps would help marketers in their decisions. i just want to emphasize the need for balance in the overall design of a web