Eye tracking. Looks that matters

The way we look gives us away. As body posture does, facial movements or where we are heading show ourselves inner feelings. We are not going to get into the controversy of whether an eye-tracking study also can be considered neuromarketing work, but it is true that it is a tool that provides important value in this discipline. 

There are different ways of showing the results of studies with eye trackers. One of them is to do it with the traditional heat maps that shows the areas that concentrate the participant’s gaze, drawing with colours those areas that concentrate more gazes (generally green is chosen for the less gazed areas and red for the most ones, leaving without drawing those areas that do not concentrate gazes during the minimum time configured). The result is very useful graphics, but even more useful when combined with other types of representation..

Grace trace maps are also used. In them, a line joins several points and apparently tells us the order of the gaze trace. This method is useful because it shows us in which order the elements are looked at-importance for packaging, for example.

However, one of the least known utilities of this system and, nevertheless, one of the most interesting is the gaze trace map which paints the gaze trace but with an attachment time lower than that of the heat map, which, when superimposed on the het map, provides information both on where the gaze is concentrated (heat map) and on those elements that are looked at but which are processed almost automatically. These elements may (or may not) attract the user ‘s attention, but if we do not paint the map in this way they go completely unnoticed.

The gaze, therefore, is very important. It says a lot about who is looking but also about what is being looked at. However, the most important thing is to have specialists and tools that know how to analyse these data, or, otherwise, we will only have a pretty graph to look at.