Posted by Greg Edwards on February 21 2005
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How Eyetracking Helps Website Redesigns: an Eyetools Case-Study

Client realizes 10x increase in click-throughs after redesigning a homepage guided by three Eyetools mini-studies.
Test #1 of Existing (old) Page	Test #2 of Prototypes	Test #3 of (new) "Best practices" Page	Launch
Most content wasn't seen. Most people preferred the competition.	3 prototypes generated based on data from test #1. Prototypes were quickly generated as images (can test image-mock-ups or HTML).	Most successful elements of each prototype from test #2 pulled together into a final prototype. Most content now seen. Most preferred this website over competitor. An entire column of paid-content was added, and was economically successful.	Click-throughs increased by 10x times. Satisfaction increased by double. Faster redesign — entire process took less than 45 days from start to launch (including the three tests) because all the parties involved agreed on what was working and what needed fixing.

Client realizes 10x increase in click-throughs after redesigning a homepage guided by three Eyetools mini-studies.

Test #1 of Existing (old) Page

Test #2 of Prototypes

Test #3 of (new) "Best practices" Page

Launch

Clientbeforeaggimage_182

Most content wasn't seen.
Most people preferred the competition.

3 prototypes generated based on data from test #1.
Prototypes were quickly generated as images (can test image-mock-ups or HTML).

Clientafteraggimage

Most successful elements of each prototype from test #2 pulled together into a final prototype.
Most content now seen.
Most preferred this website over competitor.
An entire column of paid-content was added, and was economically successful.

Click-throughs increased by 10x times.
Satisfaction increased by double.
Faster redesign — entire process took less than 45 days from start to launch (including the three tests) because all the parties involved agreed on what was working and what needed fixing.

A PDF of this homepage redesign using Eyetools eyetracking can be found here (4 pages, 905 K, images of a site before/after, plus Eyetools heatmaps).

Guiding a website redesign with Eyetools eyetracking data offers these advantages:

Objective, visual feedback to your designers and copywriters about what works and what doesn't,
Test before launching — don't launch a mistake that loses traffic,
Remove "opinion-based discussions" (and guess-work) about what is seen.

Comments

Healing the Body

May 11, 2008 at 07:16 AM

There appears very little difference between the before and after images. Certainly, the newer revised version is elongated, and there are more pictures, staggered, to draw the visitor down below the fold. It is a study worthy of evaluation and experimentation, though without the eyetracking feedback, it may just be academic. Good stuff.

Alex Roe

http://www.blogfromitaly.com/

October 1, 2009 at 07:16 AM

Very interesting this analysis of how web pages are 'seen'. Something I would like to know is whether the results obtained in studies of web sites in English are similar or different from studies of sites in other languages. I imagine, for example, that languages which read from right to left, Hebrew and Arabic produce different results from English language texts. My interest lies in Italian, and I would be very interested to hear if eyetracking studies of web texts in Italian have been carried out, and if so, whether they are different from the results for English language texts. I also believe that the Italians may view readability in a different way from English language readers. For example, Italian texts do not make wide use of paragraphs or white space. Indeed, I have been told that a text with too much white space is perceived as not being authoritative. Any thoughts you may have on this would be very interesting to hear. Best regards, Alex Roe

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