According
to a recent report men tend to fixate on areas of private anatomy. And I’m afraid
it doesn’t end there. We male crotch
watchers even stare at the crotches of animals!
Eye Tracking measures eye movements and reveals patterns by determining where users
are looking. The Poynter Institute sum
it nice and simply by describing eye tracking as getting inside of a person's
head and watching what they see.
This
technique has long been used to study visual attention and is used in web
usability design to identify what regions of a web page a user focuses
on. Eye Tracking reveals where
users start browsing, where users expect to find certain things, how
different treatments impacts their attention, what atracts the eye as well as what repels the eye etc
In a recent interview Coyne presents some interesting findings from her research with Jakob Nielsen on the Usability of News sites:-
‘Although
both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out
information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy
as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.
Coyne adds
that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to
fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when
users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.’
Gaze Mapping is one technique for presenting the results from eye tracking by superimposing
the results from the eye tracking session over the video or image. This technique has immediate impact as it highlights the region(s) of focus.
The results clearly implicate men as crotch watchers.
A criticism of Eye Tracking is that users gaze can be unpredictable and therefore
the results are hard to analyse. Individuals
can claim they have a lazy eye or their eye was just resting at what conveniently
happened to be a crotch but surely it’s more than coincidence that such a high
percentage of men rest their eyes in the same place!
I recommend reading the full article – Eyetracking points
the way to effective news article design
In the
meantime I’ll make a conscious effort to focus above the waistline at all
times.