How Can Modeling Eye-Movement and Brain Activity Help Me With My Business?

:Applied Human-Machine and Media Interaction Modeling Group

 

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How Modeling Helps Business

Many people have asked how building models showing how a person’s eye moves to look at features on a computer screen or how modeling their brain activity while they look at a screen can help in the business world.  The answer is quite simple.  It provides us with more knowledge about how people interact with the services and the products we provide.  Moreover, it helps us to identify how we can improve our products and services.  For existing businesses, this means that we can identify how to get that extra 1 or 2 percent without making significant changes to what currently exists.  For new businesses, this means that we can design and create near optimal web sites from the ground up, reducing the risk of having to completely revise the website after spending a substantial amount of money on something that isn’t quite 'up to snuff'.

 

Simply, model construction and analysis can tell us where we should focus our efforts, showing us where we need to spend time and money to improve our current strategies and shows us what strategies are already effective.

 

 

 

The Big Idea: Linking Google Analytics to Eye-Tracking

One of the big ideas here is that if we build a model of, for example, eye-movement using data collected while a small number of people view a website (say—80 people), we can infer how many thousands of people might also view the web site.  We can identify where potential customers are most likely to look on the screen, and importantly, which aspects of a web page are appealing and lead potential customers along a path to purchasing a product or service.

 

Model building also allows us to identify sub-populations of customers.  For example, a study of eye-movement can help us identify who is familiar with the content of a website and potentially their familiarity with the product.  This group can be distinguished from new potential customers who have not yet become familiar with the product.  By doing so, two different selling strategies can be created that are customized for each type of customer.

 

Eye-Tracking to Improve Return On Investment (ROI)

Tobii Eye-Tracking, a company that specializes in eye-tracking hardware has posted a video on YouTube that provides a very convincing argument for using eye-tracking to evaluate ROI in advertising.

 

 

While the video above is very convincing of the benefits of eye-tracking.  The Tobii video below shows that eye-tracking can provide a statistically robust.

 

 

Analysis of Brain Activity Can Identify Cognitive Strategies

Our research examining cognitive brain activities while playing video games has demonstrated that brain activity analysis can also give us insights into how people interact with their environment.  For example, by obtaining measures of brain activity from a person’s scalp while they play a video game, we have been able to identify two different types of brain activity that occurred while game playing.  This can be used to help determine what type of game-playing strategy is employed by the gamer and thus inform game developers about how to improve their video games.

 

 

- Author: Philip Michael Zeman -